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THE OLD TOWN 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




.^aWsUwlio^B^ 



Post Office." 



THE OLD TOWN 



BY 



JACOB A. RIIS 



AUTHOR OF "THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN," "HOW 
THE OTHER HALF LIVES," " THE BATTLE WITH 



THE SLUM." ETC. 



n 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
BY W. T. BENDA 



"Nzia fgorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1909 

All rights reserved 






rV 



COPTRISHT, 1909, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909. 



39 5 



Nfltfoooti Jireas 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



|tt 



TO ALL WHO LOVE 

THE OLD HOME AND THE 

OLD FRIENDS 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 

How small this world of ours is, and how close 
we are, all unknowing, to one another! I had 
set out to write the story of the Old Town with 
no thought that it touched the land across the 
seas and its people in any closer way than through 
these pages, and through the abiding affection 
of a few of its children who, like myself, have 
wandered far from home. And while I wrote 
there fell into my hands the account of a sale of 
some building lots half a dozen years ago, in 
Jersey City, part of a property which for three 
hundred years had belonged to the Van Riepen 
family. And the Van Riepen name was shown to 
mean "from Ribe" — the Old Town itself. This 
is the historical record : 

From the port of Ribe there sailed in April, 
1663, a ship bearing the name Te Bonte Koe, mean- 
ing "The Brindle Cow," bound for New Amster- 

vii 



viii THE OLD AND THE NEW 

dam with eighty-nine passengers aboard. Among 
them was one Juriaen Tomasson, a citizen of Ribe, 
who, four years after reaching these shores, mar- 
ried Pryntje Hermans — to be exact, on May 25, 
1667; and died on September 12, 1695. From 
their union sprang two well-known families, one 
that twisted the Danish name of Jorgen (Juriaen 
in the record) into Jurianse, which later became 
Yearance ; and the other the Van Riepen, or Van 
Ripen, family, which thus preserved the name of 
the Old Town in its purity of pronunciation. For 
Ribe is pronounced Reebe. The Germans to this 
day call it Ripen on their maps. 

It did more than preserve the mere name — it 
kept its spirit alive. In the chronicles of the 
Revolution preserved in his home state we read 
of a Lieutenant Daniel Van Riepen, 1 one of the 
descendants of the Juriaen who came over in Te 
Bonte Koe, being captured by the Royalists and 
imprisoned in the old Sugar House with other 

1 The full story may be read in the " History of Hudson 
County," where my friend, Rev. R. Andersen, of the Danish 
church in Brooklyn, an indefatigable delver, unearthed this 
chip of the old block. 



THE OLD AND THE NEW ix 

patriots. He must have borne the marks of the 
hardships they suffered there, for when he was 
brought before a court-martial in Hoboken to be 
tried and shot as a rebel, he was ragged and with- 
out uniform or distinctions of rank. Asked by 
the presiding judge why he came thus, being an 
officer, he made reply: "It is not clothes or arms 
that make the man." 

"What then?" sneered his accuser, one Van 
Horst. 

"This, sir!" said Van Riepen, and smote his 
breast proudly. Whereat the British officer who 
attended ordered that he be released. 

"He is a man," he said. "Were I ten times a 
prisoner, I could give no better answer." And 
the patriot went free. 

So the old world and the new have met, and the 
Old Town won the day once more, this time far 
from home, with the best of all weapons, — the 
manhood that is its hall-mark wherever its chil- 
dren are found. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Old and the New vii 

Chapter I 1 

Chapter II 26 

Chapter III . 49 

Chapter IV 78 

Chapter V 104 

Chapter VI 143 

Chapter VII 169 

Chapter VIII . . 186 

Chapter IX. Our Beautiful Summer . . . 229 

King Frederik at Home 257 



XI 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

" Post Office " Frontispiece 

PAGE 

" Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls " . .9 

" The old Domkirke reared its gray head " . facing 12 

The Causeway in a Storm 15 

Fano Women 21 

Seal of the Old Town in the Thirteenth Century . . 26 

An Old House 31 

The Iron Hand 32 

A Watchman 38 

" He found his prisoner faithfully guarding the gun when 

he came back " facing 48 

"Eyes that spoke of things unseen by the crowd" . . 49 

Peer Down's Slip facing 50 

Neighbor Quedens 52 

The Good Dean of the Domkirke 58 

The Wife of the Middle-miller . . . . . .60 

Venus ........... 61 

" Did the honors on ceremonial occasions " . facing 62 

Liar Hans 65 

The Old Family Doctor facing 74 

" They crept about, the old men with their staffs " . .77 

The Christmas Sheaf 78 

The Nisse facing 80 

" Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower " . „ 84 

" The whole family turned to and helped " . . „ 92 

" We joined hands and danced around the tree " . „ 95 

" We < smashed ' the New Year in " . . . . „ 100 

"We caught them napping there one dark night " . „ 102 

Getting Ready for the Review 104 

xiii 



xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The Stork came in April facing 104 

A Girl from the North Sea Islands . . . . „ 112 
" There were booths with toys and booths with 

trumpets " „ 115 

The Girl Market „ 119 

Where the Cows go in through the Street Door . . 121 

"Trenchers of steaming sausage " 130 

" I threw the last pebble " 141 

King Harald's Stone 143 

" In my dreams I sit by the creek " 146 

Where I shot my First Duck .... facing 147 

Picking Ravlinger in the Moor 153 

Dagmar's Despoiled Tomb 159 

In Holme Week — The Old Ferry Raft . . facing 162 

Cruising up to the Seem Church 167 

Riberhus 169 

The King's Ride over the Moor 176 

" For God and the King " facing 179 

" The King and his men knelt upon the battlefield " ,, 180 

Danish Women ransomed their King . . . . „ 181 

" Comforted the King in sorrow and defeat" . . . 181 

Jackdaws in Council 186 

" Ha ! you were just going to fire it " . . . • 195 

The Latin School Teachers 198 

The Chimney-sweep 207 

" We saw it on moonlight nights " 209 

The North Gate 212 

The Emperor's Birthday facing 215 

"It's come" 227 

The Accursed Candlestick 229 

A Strange Figure in Kilts 234 

The Restored Domkirke facing 235 

The Cat-head Door ,, 237 

The Old Cloister-church 239 

King Christian comes from Church 249 

King Frederik 259 



THE OLD TOWN 



THE OLD TOWN 



CHAPTER I 




The other day, when I 
was busy in my garden, 
I heard the whir of swift 
wings and saw a flight 
of birds coming from the 
hills in the east. Some- 
thing in the way in which 
they flew stirred me with 
a sudden thrill, and I 
stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once. 
" Blackbirds/ ' said Mike, looking aloft, but I 
knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager 
hope, and when they were over me and I saw their 
orange bills, I knew that I had not been mis- 
taken. They were starlings, beloved friends of 
my boyhood, come across the seas at last after 
all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It 



2 THE OLD TOWN 

seemed as if it must be so, and I dropped spade and 
trowel, and took up hammer and saw to make 
boxes for them as I used to, so that they might 
know I was waiting to welcome them. I am wait- 
ing now. Every day I look to see if my feathered 
chum is there, perched at my window. And he 
will come, I know. For he cannot have forgotten 
the good times we had in the long ago. 

You see, we grew up together. Almost the 
earliest thing I remember is the box at my bed- 
room window which the first rays of the rising sun 
struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter 
snows were gone and the daffodils peeped through 
the half-frozen crust, some morning there would 
be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shad- 
ows darted in and out, and a great scratching and 
thumping went on. And while I lay and watched 
with heart beating fast, — for was not here my 
songster playmate back with the summer and the 
sunlight on his burnished wing ? — out he came 
on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window, 
and sat and whistled the old tune, nodding to 
the bare trees he knew with his brave promise that 



THE OLD TOWN 3 

presently Jack Frost would be banished for good, 
and all would be right. Was he not there to 
prove it? And it was even so. The summer 
was right on his trail always. 

The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried 
in a dreamy sea of blossoming elders. In field and 
meadow the starling was busy from early dawn till 
the sun was far in the west; for his young, of 
whom there was always a vigorous family, — and 
oh! the glorious blue eggs we loved to peep at 
before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her 
wing, — had a healthy appetite and required no 
end of grubs and worms. But whether they went 
to sleep early or he thought they had had enough, 
always when the setting sun gilded the top of the 
old poplar, he would come with all his friends and 
sing his evening song. In the very top branches, 
swaying with the summer wind, they would sit 
and whistle the clear notes in the minor key I 
hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that tell 
me that some day it will all come back, the joy and 
the sunshine of the young days. It was for him 
I turned my boyish hands to their first labor of 



4 THE OLD TOWN 

love. I made him a house of an empty starch box, 
and later on, when I had learned carpentering, I 
built for his family a tenement of three flats that 
hung by my window many years after I knew it 
no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight 
with tenements made for human kind by builders 
with no such friendly feelings, when my father 
wrote that the winter storms had blown down the 
box and broken it, and that written inside in my 
boyish hand, they found these words : 

"This box is for starlings, but, by the great 

horn spoon, not for sparrows. 

"Jacob Riis." 

We did not like sparrows. They were cheeky 
tramps, good only to eat when there were enough 
of them. The starling was a friend. 

I suppose it was the near approach of the time 
of his going away, with the stork and the swallow, 
to leave us in the grip of the long winter, that 
made me in desperation try to cage him once. 
How I could, I don't know. Boys are boys every- 
where, I suppose. I made the cage with infinite 



THE OLD TOWN 5 

toil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But 
when I saw him darting from side to side strug- 
gling to get out to the trees and the grass and 
the clouds, my heart smote me, and I tore the 
cage apart and threw open the window. It was 
many days before I could look my friend in the 
eye, and I was secretly afraid all winter that he 
would not come back. But he was a generous 
bird and bore no grudge. Next spring he was 
there earlier than ever, as if he knew. 

Never have I forgotten it; it is to me as vivid 
as if it were yesterday, that black day when, with 
the instinct to "kill something " strong in me, I 
had gone out with my father's gun, and coming 
through the willows, met a starling on joyous 
wing crossing the meadow on the way to his nest. 
Up went the gun, and before I knew, I had shot 
him. I can see him folding his wings as he fell at 
my feet. I did not pick him up. I went home 
with all the sunlight gone out of the day. I have 
shot many living things since, more shame to me, 
but never one that hurt like that. I had slain my 
friend. 



6 THE OLD TOWN 

But neither have I forgotten the long peaceful 
twilights of summer when we drifted down the 
river in our boat, listening to the small talk of the 
mother duck with her young, and to the chattering 
of uncounted thousands of starlings in the reeds 
where they had settled for the night, settling too, 
as was proper, the disputes of the day before they 
went to sleep. If only men were always so wise. 
In the midst of it we would suddenly get on our 
feet and shout and clap our hands, and the flock 
would rise and rise and keep rising, farther and 
farther down the river, until the sky was darkened 
and the twilight became night, while the rush of 
the million wings swelled into rolling thunder. 
We stood open-mouthed and watched the mar- 
vellous sight, while the youngest crowded up 
close, half afraid. 

Ah, well ! they were the old days of sweet mem- 
ories, and here they have come back to me on the 
wings of the black starling. Who brought him, 
or how he came, I do not know, but glad am I. 
And while I am waiting for him to sound his mes- 
sage of cheer and good-will at my window, let me 



THE OLD TOWN 7 

try and hold fast awhile the Old Town we both 
loved, and from which it must be that he has 
come straight. Else, why should he seek me out ? 
Where the northernmost boundary post of the 
German empire, shaken by the rude blasts of the 
North Sea, points its black menacing ringer tow- 
ard the little remnant of stricken Denmark, it 
stood a thousand years, a lonely sentinel with its 
face toward the southern foe. Kings were born 
and buried within its portals, proud bishops ruled 
it, armies fought for it, and over it, but all these 
things had passed away. Centuries before it had 
bidden good-by to the pageantry of royalty and 
courts, and had gone to sleep with its mouldering 
past. And it had slept ever since save when the 
tramp of armies stirred uneasy dreams ; but they 
halted no longer at its gates. The snort of the 
iron horse, hitched to the nineteenth century, 
had not yet aroused it in my day. No shriek of 
steam whistle, scarce a ripple from the great world 
without, disturbed its rest. There was, indeed, a 
factory in town, always spoken of as the factory, a 
cotton mill of impossible pretensions, grotesque in 



8 THE OLD TOWN 

its mediaeval setting, and discredited by public 
opinion as a kind of flying in the face of tradition 
and Providence at once that invited sure disaster. 
When disaster did come, though it took the 
power of two empires to bring it about, — it was 
an immediate result of the war of conquest waged 
by Germany and Austria against Denmark that 
drew the boundary line and built custom-houses 
within sight of the factory windows, — it was ac- 
cepted as a judgment any one could have foretold. 
But even that bold intruder had never been guilty 
of the impropriety of whistling. The drowsy clat- 
ter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs dipped 
over garden walls into the loitering stream was 
the only sound of industry that broke the pro- 
found peace. The flour-mills were among the 
privileged traditions of the town. They had been 
handed down from father to son in unbroken suc- 
cession since the exclusive right to grind the flour 
of the community had been granted to them by 
the early kings. No one had ever disputed that 
right. Perhaps it was not worth contending for; 
anyhow, it would have been useless. Could a 



THE OLD TOWN 9 

clearer title to possession be imagined than that 
the thing had been there before any one could 
remember ? 




" Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls." 

Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled 
roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows reared 



10 THE OLD TOWN 

their young under the broad eaves, protected like 
their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of 
the people, and by the superstition that assigned 
sure misfortune, even if nothing worse than a 
plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane 
hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old 
cloister, where the echo of sandalled feet on stone 
floors seemed always to linger, — steps of good 
friars long since dust in forgotten graves, — they 
flew in and out, and though they built two nests 
for one, since they were given to raising two broods 
in the brief summer, they did not wear their wel- 
come out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra 
shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows 
tenants before him ? 

Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the 
streets in rusty chains that squeaked in every 
vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the 
cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinder- 
boxes and quill* pens seemed quite the thing. I 
well remember the distrustful resentment in which 
old teachers held the " English " (steel) pens. 
They still clung to the goose-quill, which no one 



THE OLD TOWN 11 

to-day would know how to cut. But the word 
"penknife " had meaning in those days. En- 
velopes were a still later discovery. Letters 
were folded and sealed with wax, and we boys 
collected seals as the boys of to-day collect stamps; 
and a good deal more of variety and human in- 
terest there was in the collection. I mind the 
excitement when the first bottle of " Pennsyl- 
vania oil" came into our house. I fetched it my- 
self from the grocer's, bottled like beer at eight 
skilling a bottle. Very likely they were Liibeck 
skilling, reminiscent of the middle ages when the 
Hanse Towns so thoroughly monopolized all trade 
in the North that their very coinage endured cen- 
turies after their League had ceased to be. Other 
things lasted. Their factors in foreign lands were 
bachelors, whether from choice or compulsion I 
do not know, and to this day the Danish word for 
bachelor is "Pebersvend," i.e. pepper clerk, spices 
being a chief ware in their shops. As for the tele- 
graph, people shook their heads at it as a more 
than dubious American notion, though the un- 
doubted success of the first sewing-machine that 



12 THE OLD TOWN 

had come to town had disposed them to lend a 
lenient ear to its claims. 

Above this little world of men the old Dom- 
kirke reared its gray head, a splendid vision of 
the great things that were. Travellers approach- 
ing the town saw it from afar, a majestic pile 
against whose strong walls the town leaned with 
its time-worn old houses and crooked streets 
as if seeking strength and comfort against the 
assault of the gathering years. Its square red 
tower was a landmark for skippers far out at 
sea. The Dom itself was, and always had been, 
the heart and soul of the Old Town. It was so 
when the early Christian bishops built it in the 
twelfth century, for though kings abode in its 
shadow, they were their advisers and the real mas- 
ters of the city. It was even more so after the 
Reformation had clipped the wings of the clergy. 
With their power went the commerce and the 
prestige of the Old Town; there remained little 
but the Domkirke and the Latin School that had 
been part of it from the beginning, and about these 
centred its life and all its normal interest. There 




The old Domkirke reared its gray head. 



THE OLD TOWN 13 

were those, it is true, who dreamed of a return of 
the great days by wedding Ribe once more to the 
sea through a ship canal to deep water, but it was 
a dream that ended when they built a harbor at 
Esbjerg, a scant dozen miles away. After that 
the Old Town slept on, undisturbed by the world 
without. 

They were mighty men who built the Domkirke, 
and went far afield for the stone of which they 
reared it. There is none in Denmark, so they sent 
their ships over the North Sea and up the river 
Rhine for the gray stone of which they built 
the walls, and in quarries on the Weser they found 
granite for the great pillars and sandstone for the 
lighter ones. They wrought in the fashion of 
their day, but those that came after them and 
raised the great tower of burned brick had learned 
another that suited their purpose better; and so 
while the gentler Roman curve was that of the 
church, the tower stood forth in the massive 
strength of the Goth, as it had need, for it was the 
strong place of the burghers as the castle was the 
King's stronghold. Watchmen kept a constant 



14 THE OLD TOWN 

lookout from it in times of war for an approaching 
enemy, and the great bell hung there, the " storm 
bell/' that called the people to arms. It had long 
been dumb in my day, for it was feared that to 
ring it would imperil the tower. But when the 
autumn storms bellowed about the gables of the 
Dom, sometimes we heard at dead of night a deep 
singing note above the crash of falling tiles, and 
then we hugged our pillows close and held our 
breath to listen; for when the bell sang, it was 
warning that the sea was coming in. 

The Old Town stood on a wide plain, the fertile 
marsh between it and the shore, behind it the 
barren heath, with no tree or shrub to break the 
sweep of the pitiless west wind. The very broom 
on the barrows, beneath which slept the old vi- 
kings, it cropped short on the side that looked 
toward the sea they loved so well. Summer and 
winter it piped its melancholy lay above their 
heads. At sundown the sea-fogs, rolling in over 
the land in a dense gray cloud, wrapped them in 
their damp embrace. There was no dike to pro- 
tect the coast, but beyond the shallows lay a 



THE OLD TOWN 



15 



string of islands that within historic times had 
been torn from the mainland, and these stood the 
brunt of the onset when the North Sea was angry. 
But when the wind had blown hard from the west 
for days, as was its wont, and then veered to the 
north, so that the waters from the great deep were 




The Causeway in a Storm. 

massed in the inlet, then it was we heard the big 
bell sing in the tower. 

Morning broke after such a night, upon a raging 
ocean where at sunset there had been meadows 
and dry fields. Far as the eye reached only storm- 
tossed waves were in sight. The shores were 



16 THE OLD TOWN 

strewn with perch and other fresh-water fish that 
were driven up on the pavement in shoals by 
the rushing tides. On the great causeway that 
stretched north and south, high above the flood 
level, cattle, hares, grouse, and field-mice huddled 
together in wretched, shivering groups. With 
break of day the butchers of the town went out, if 
going was at all possible, to bleed the drowning 
cattle that could yet be saved for food. Some- 
times the trip had to be made in boats, and even 
in the streets of the town these were in demand 
when the " storm-flood " was at its height. I 
recollect very well seeing the water washing 
through the ground-story windows of the houses 
down by the harbor. By ordinary tides we were 
there five miles from the sea. At such times, 
when the flood had surprised the cattle yet in 
the far-outlying pastures, we heard news of dis- 
aster. The herders had been slow in gaining the 
refuges provided for them, and had perished with 
their herds. 

If the flood came before the mail had got in, 
an anxious outlook was kept at the town gate, 



THE OLD TOWN 17 

where the sea could be seen rising higher and 
higher, threatening with each swell to wash 
quite over the roadway. White-painted posts 
were set on both sides of it to mark out the way 
for the driver even if water covered it knee- 
deep, but in spite of this precaution, the trip was 
full of peril. If the coach were blown over, or 
the team succumbed, the passengers had but a 
slim chance of escaping with their lives. On 
such nights a band of resolute men gathered in 
the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to 
the rescue on the first warning of danger. I was 
very proud to be one of these when I was a big 
boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the sum- 
mons came and we sallied forth to bring the ex- 
hausted team in, it took all my strength to stand 
against the furious blast. The waves beat upon 
the causeway and were carried across it in a pelt- 
ing rain of brine that stung like whip-lashes. In 
water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness 
and numbed with cold, we groped our way tow- 
ard the lights of the town scarce a hundred 
yards away. How that driver had lived through 



18 THE OLD TOWN 

it, I shall never understand. The relief when we 
reached shelter was great, but greater my pride 
when the stern old Amtmand, the chief govern- 
ment officer of the county, caught me by the 
shoulder and whirled me around to have a look 
at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need. 

" Strong boy/' he said, and rapped me smartly 
with his cane; "be a man yet/' which was praise 
indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold 
and wet through, in my pride. 

They used to tell a story of another Amtmand 
who, fresh from his snug berth at the capital, had 
come out to take the post in the Old Town, as ill 
luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just 
such a night. It was too much for him. He 
waited only till the tide fell enough to clear the 
way, then fled the town, with the parting shot 
that u Ribe might be good enough for ducks and 
geese, but not for men." He never came back, 
but set up his office in another town where he 
was out of reach of the North Sea. Well for 
him he was not there on that awful Christmas 
Eve when the water reached the very Domkirke 



THE OLD TOWN 19 

itself, and rose five feet or more over its floor. 
Many years before, another flood had torn thirty 
parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them 
up. It stands in the old records as "de grote 
Mandranck" (1362) because of the loss of life 
it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the 
water rose so high in the streets that the cloister 
of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the 
monks caught fish for their supper in the por- 
tico that enclosed their garden. One may be 
permitted the hope that this flood came on a 
Friday to fitly replenish their larder. 

Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one 
long succession of such disasters that had craved 
lives and wasted treasure without end, yet had 
never taught the people the lesson their southern 
neighbors had learned early. "Preserve, Lord, 
the dikes and dams in the King's marshlands; 
watch over the widows and the fatherless/ ' read 
a petition in our old prayer-book. The King's 
marshlands went their way when the Germans 
stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands 
still in its undiked plain, heedless alike of warn- 



20 THE OLD TOWN 

ing and experience. One may see all I have 
written here, by evil chance this very winter, 
if he cares to go and risk it. 

When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed 
out, field and beach were covered with the drift 
of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale, 
and amid the snows of the northern winter we 
boys roasted our potatoes, and an occasional 
dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached 
husks of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, water- 
logged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the 
tropics. 

It could not well be otherwise than that the 
sea, which knocked upon our doors so often and 
so rudely, played a great part in the lives and in 
the imagination of the people. From the islands 
I spoke of the whole male population was absent 
in summer, and often enough the year round. 
They were sailors, all of them, and a Fano 1 skip- 
per to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that 
ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia. 

1 Fano and Mano are the two islands just outside the Old 
Town. 



THE OLD TOWN 21 

The women, left in charge of the little farms, did 
all the chores, including the getting in of such crops 
as they raised in their sand-dunes and tending to 
the stock. The Old Town, too, left stranded by 



ujr.' 






Fano Women. 

the sanding in of the mouth of the river, never- 
theless furnished its full quota to the merchant 
marine of more lands than Denmark. The sea 
gave it lime to build its houses with, and the 
lime that was burned of sea-shells held what it 
was laid to bind. It gave the fisherman a living, 



22 THE OLD TOWN 

and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets 
than our day knows of. Clear pine floors, 
scrubbed spotlessly clean and with the white sea- 
sand swept in "tongues" over them, had a home- 
like something about them which no forty-dollar 
rug harbors. 

The thunder-storms, which in the dog-days 
were often very severe, came and went with the 
tides. The same storm, having gone out to sea 
with the ebb, would come back on the flood tide 
and keep the farmers awake who lived under a 
roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as 
many as half a score of farm-houses burning after 
a long night's storm. Thus, too, people died 
when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death- 
bed could not find rest while the tide was in, but 
when it went out he went out with it. There 
was something in all this of the old days when 
Odin and Thor were worshipper 1 vhere the Dom- 
kirke now stood, something of the nature worship 
and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it Oli- 
ver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omni- 
buses in which all our ancestors ride ? Sometimes 



THE OLD TOWN 23 

I find myself struggling with a "fate" which 
I cannot bend to my will or purpose, and then 
comes to me out of the past the Jute farmer's 
calm "When a man's time is up, he must die;" 
along with the recollection of a friend's experi- 
ence, a clergyman in that country. A woman 
with a child born out of wedlock sought poor 
relief because of her handicap. When he re- 
monstrated gently that she had saddled herself 
with a needless burden, her curt reply was: "No 
use talking that way; the children one has to 
have, one will get." 

The philosophy of one of my teachers in the 
Latin School was of a different kind. It was 
custom in the Old Town for the members of the 
Fire Company to get up and get ready at the 
third heavy clap of thunder, and though my 
father was not of the corps he followed the cus- 
tom. Dressed for the street, with his insurance 
and other valuable papers ready to hand, he sat 
the storm out in his easy-chair, the better to 
marshal his household in time of need. His 
friend could not understand that any one should 



24 THE OLD TOWN 

break his sleep for a thunder-storm and go to all 
that trouble. "What for?" he asked. 

" Suppose the lightning were to strike the 
house," said my father. 

The other looked stunned. "Why," he said, 
"what beastly bad luck." 

With all this record of fight and fire and flood, 
the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its 
prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The 
west wind that cut like a knife in November 
was soft in June as the touch of a woman's hand. 
The grass was never as green in meadow; the 
wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank 
were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in 
forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in 
my childhood's home, as it soared toward the 
sky. The streets in the Old Town were narrow 
and crooked, and in their cobble-stone pave- 
ments the rain stood in pools that tempted un- 
wary feet. But there were lights in the windows 
for glad home-comers. Neighbor knew neighbor 
and shared his grief and his joys. No one was 
rich, as wealth is counted nowadays; but then 



THE OLD TOWN 25 

no one was allowed to want for the daily bread. 
"Good day and God help" was the everyday 
salutation to a man at work; "God bless," if he 
were eating. They were ways of speech, it is 
true, but they were typical of the good feeling 
that was over and above all the sign of the Old 
Town and its people. 



CHAPTER II 




If war and war's alarms 
creep into the story of the 
Old Town on every page, 
despite the fact that its 
name to me is peace, the 
reason is not far to seek. 
I was not yet a month old 
when my mother had to 
fly from home with me in 
seal of the old town in the her arms, on the outbreak 

Thirteenth Century. 

of war. A report ran 
through the land that the " slaves," that is, the 
prisoners in the Holstein state prison, had been 
freed by the Germans and were swarming north, 
the vanguard of an army that looted and laid 
waste where it went. The women with little chil- 
dren were hurriedly sent away, and the Old Town 
prepared to give battle to the invaders. Barri- 
cades were built and manned ; the council requi- 

26 



THE OLD TOWN 27 

sitioned two hundred pounds of powder from the 
next town, to be carried in as he could by the vil- 
lage express, who made his trips on foot, and they 
dug up an old cannon that had done duty as a 
hitching post a hundred years or more, to impress 
it into the municipal defence. The unencumbered 
women moulded bullets and boiled water and pitch 
in the houses overlooking the route of the enemy's 
supposed advance. The parishes roundabout 
sent squads of peasants to the defence armed 
with battle-axes and spears. They will show you 
those weapons yet in the Town Hall. They keep 
the record there, too, of the council at which 
peace prevailed, on the showing of military ex- 
perts that it would cost two hundred daler 1 to 
dam the river and flood the fields to stop an 
army. That was voted to be too steep a price 
to pay for being sacked, perhaps, in the end, as 
a captured town. But it is not the whole story, 
I am sure. Better sense must have dawned, I 
imagine, at the sight of those armaments. That 
they would have died on the barricades to the 

1 About one hundred dollars. 



28 THE OLD TOWN 

last man in defence of their homes I know, for 
I knew them. How carefully and deliberately 
they planned is shown by the erection of one of 
the barricades in front of the drug store, where 
Hoffmann's Drops would be handy "in case any 
were taken ill." It was not faint-heart edness, 
but cool foresight. 

When the summons came for the last time, I 
was a half-grown boy. I remember it, that gray 
October morning, when a gendarme, all dusty 
and famished from his long, hard ride, reined 
in his panting horse at the tavern in the market- 
place, where the children were just then swarm- 
ing with their school books. I hear the clatter 
of the iron-shod hoofs in the quiet streets, 
the clanging of his sabre as he leaped from 
the saddle and spoke gravely to the inn-keeper. 
Far and fast as he had come, riding farther and 
riding farther; ghostly legions were even then 
hurrying from the south on his trail to grieve the 
echoes of the Old Town. I see the sudden awe 
in the faces as the whispered message went from 
mouth to mouth, "The King is dead," — the 



THE OLD TOWN 29 

King whom the people loved as their friend, last 
of his house, to whose life was linked inseparably 
the destiny of Denmark. I see the solemn face 
of our old Rector and hear the quiver in his 
voice as he bade us go home, there would be no 
school that day; a great sorrow had come upon 
the land. 

I see our little band trooping homeward, all 
desire to skip or play swallowed up in a vague 
dread of nameless disaster. I live over again the 
dark days when, in the hush of all other sounds 
and cares, we listened by night and by day to the 
boom of cannon coming nearer and nearer from 
the Eider, where the little Danish flock was 
matched in unequal combat against the armies 
of two mighty empires. Then the flight of 
broken and scattered regiments, hunted, travel- 
worn, and desperate, through the town. The 
bivouac in the Square, with shotted guns pointing 
southward over the causeway. The smile that 
will come is followed by a tear as I recall the 
trembling eagerness, the feverish haste of faith- 
ful hands that packed our school arsenal — 



30 THE OLD TOWN 

twenty-five historic muskets of the Napoleonic 
era — in boxes to be taken out to sea and sunk, 
lest they become the prey of the enemy. They 
are rusting there yet. After we had seen the 
Prussian needle-guns, they were left to their 
fate. And when the last friend was gone on his 
way, the long days of suspense, the nightly vigils 
at the South-gate, where at last we heard the 
tread of approaching armies which none of us 
should live to see return; for within our sight 
Denmark was cut in twain by German bayonets. 
So, a child of the Old Town may be forgiven 
for calling up the Red Gods on occasion. In- 
deed, they had left their tracks where he who 
ran might read. The other day I heard how, in 
restoring the Bishop's Manse, they had come upon 
traces of the old spiral stairway, which even in that 
house of peace wound to the right, as the custom 
was, so that the man defending it might have 
his right hand free, while the attacking enemy 
had to strike from the left. Perhaps, though, 
it was not always a house of peace, nor the enemy 
all of the world and the flesh, for I read in the 



THE OLD TOWN 



31 



archives of the Domkirke of a least one pitched 
battle between the Brethren of the Chapter, that 
is, the clerics attached to the cathedral, and 
the Bishop, in which the latter had his robe torn 
from his back. Three hundred years later I find 



*-*■= -.j*° *****■■"* 







An Old House. 

the Chapter uniting in a round-robin to the 
Bishop, in which perjury, simony, and lewdness 
are among the open offences laid at his door. 
Unless he mend his ways, they give notice, they 
will have him before the Pope. 

Doughty scrappers were they ever, those old 
Jutes. Doubtless there was reason for the Ribe 



32 



THE OLD TOWN 



justice that was proverbial throughout the days 
when each town was a law unto itself. " 'You 
thank God, sonny, ' is an old saw that has come 
down to this day, 'that you weren't punished by 
Bibe law/ said the old woman, when she saw her 
son hung on the Varde gallows." Varde was 




The Iron Hand. 



the next town, a little way up the coast. The 
symbol of that justice was an iron hand over the 
town gate which, tradition said, warned any who 
might be disposed to buy up grain and food-stuffs 
to their own gain, that for "cornering" the means 
of living, in Ribe a man had his right hand cut off. 
Good that the hand was never nailed on Trinity 
Church or on the Chicago Board of Trade, else what 



THE OLD TOWN 33 

a one-handed lot of men we should have there 
and in Wall Street ! Whether that was the real 
purpose of it or not, the Old Town was ruled 
with an iron hand indeed in those days. Witness 
the report, preserved in its archives, of the 
conviction of a woman for stealing the hand-iron 
which her thieving husband carried off with him 
when he broke jail. She filed it off and threw 
it into a neighbor's yard, and not only she, but 
the neighbor, too, was convicted of theft. And 
stealing was a hanging matter. Stealing less 
than two dollars' worth of property took a man 
to the gallows straight; but a woman, "for de- 
cency's sake," was buried alive in the gallows 
hill. For murder, counterfeiting and adultera- 
tion of honey, — why specially honey, I do not 
know, — and for eloping with another's wife, a 
man's head was chopped off with the big sword 
that still hung in the Town Hall. There were 
holes in the end of it, so that it might be weighted 
and made to "bite." The bigamist was merely 
turned out of town and mulcted in half his be- 
longings. But even the iron hand did not stop 



34 THE OLD TOWN 

brawling, and other measures had to be adopted. 
A man was accused of knocking another on the 
head with a spear, — prodding was the fashion 
of murder only, — but legal evidence was lacking. 
Nevertheless, the "jury of the North-gate " found 
him guilty on the principle that for an eye an 
eye was due, and he was sentenced to pay dam- 
ages to the injured man, to the King, and to the 
town, and to stand committed " until such time 
as he catches another in his place." And he in 
jail! 

It seems almost jolly by comparison, certainly 
it has a more modern, not to say familiar sound, 
to find another jury acquitting a malefactor in 
the face of convincing evidence of his guilt upon 
grounds that seem delicately suggested in the 
question from the bench why they, the jurymen, 
"had demanded a keg of beer of the prisoner." 
The record mentions one obstinate juryman, 
perhaps the original prohibitionist, who entered 
an ineffectual protest against the verdict. 

With all their staid solemnity there is a comic 
vein in some of these old records. As, for in- 



THE OLD TOWN 35 

stance, when Jep Bennedsen, appearing to prose- 
cute a horse thief, swears that "the dappled mare 
which is here present, he bought of Anders Munk 
and it is God's and his own horse." Or, when a 
man charged with the theft of a neighbor's axe 
proceeds to swear "on his soul and salvation and 
his uplifted hand, and asks God to curse him and 
push him in under the foot of Lucifer if he ever 
had the axe " ; then, suddenly reflecting, adds, 
"Wait; if I did, I will give it back to him." But 
the musty pages in which these facts are set down 
with minutest care betray no appreciation of 
their humor. 

The stern old Ribe justice had but a leg and a 
half left to stand on, as it were, in my day. The 
effective police force of the town consisted of 
two able-bodied night-watchmen and a beadle 
with a game leg, but with a temper and an oaken 
staff that more than made up for his other de- 
fects. In ordinary times, always excepting New 
Year's Eve, when it was the privilege of the Old 
Town to cut up as it saw fit, this was quite suffi- 
cient to preserve the public peace, for brawling 



36 THE OLD TOWN 

as an occupation had long ceased, and crime 
was almost unknown. The commotion that was 
caused by a real burglary when I was a little lad 
can therefore be understood. As a matter of 
fact there was nothing very alarming about the 
crime. The thief had merely forced a door, that 
was fastened after the simple fashion of the day 
and place with a wooden whorl, and taken some 
money from an open drawer; but he had cut his 
hand in doing it, and there were smears of blood 
on the wall that made the mystery ever so much 
more dreadful to us all. To cap the climax, it 
was public property he had taken, the King's 
money, for it was the custom-house he had robbed. 
The whole community was aroused, and the town 
council met promptly to consider the emergency. 
It is fair to state that it distinctly rose to it. The 
records of that meeting are still in existence. The 
business in hand, so they state, being to catch 
the thief, it was suggested by a member that this 
could not be done while the watchmen clattered 
about at night in wooden clogs and cried the 
hours; for so they gave warning to any evil- 



THE OLD TOWN 37 

doer who might be lurking around. To this the 
meeting agreed, and it was resolved that they 
must henceforth cease bawling and put on boots 
— and rubbers. The sum of four daler was voted 
to equip the force with these police accoutre- 
ments, and was duly entered in the budget of 
the town to be raised by taxation. 

The thief, if I remember rightly, was never 
caught, but the event proved that the departure 
from the ancient landmarks was too radical. 
Thief or no thief, the town could by no possibil- 
ity sleep without being awakened hourly by the 
cry of the watchmen; or if it did go to sleep it 
didn't know it, which was almost, if not quite, as 
bad. Universal insomnia threatened to wreck 
its peace. Within a month the entire community, 
headed by the councilmen themselves, petitioned 
the municipality to unloose again the watchmen's 
tongues. A compromise was made upon the 
basis of the boots, and was religiously kept till 
within a year, when, I am told, the crying of the 
hour finally ceased. 

I am sorry it did, for it was a picturesque relic 



38 



THE OLD TOWN 



of its mediaeval past, which after all is the real 
setting of the Old Town. It was not a mere 

cry, or senseless shout. 
In its mournful mel- 
ody, that took kindly 
to the cracked and 
weather-beaten voices 
of the singers, I live 
over again those long 
and lonesome nights 
when I lay awake, lis- 
tening to the buffeting 
of the winds, and fol- 
lowed the ships on 
their course over the 
sea where it swept 
unchecked, wondering 
what the great world 
in which they moved 
might be like. People 
went to bed early in those days, and the watch- 
man raised his voice at eight o'clock. From that 
hour until four in the morning he sang his song, 




A Watchman. 



THE OLD TOWN 



39 



every hour a new verse, supposed to have special 
reference to the time of night. The curious com- 
mingling of pious exhortation with homely ad- 
vice on the everyday affairs of domestic life was 
characteristic of the time and of the people. 
At ten o'clock he put in a pointed reminder to 
the laggard that it was time to turn in, thus: 

Andante. 



fe 



=t 



4: 



-JV 



^=d=^ 



-z=>- 



P : 



w -th -J- 
Ho, watchman ! heard ye the clock strike ten ? This 



* 



i 



-N- 



W- 



9—4 



-&- 



hour is worth the know- ing Ye house-holds high and 



& 



~&r 



-0- 



low, The time is here and go - ing When ye to bed should 

rit. .... 



-t- 



£= 



^ 



T5»-- 



•— 



^ 



go; 

oft riL 


Ask God 


to guard, and say A - 


men 1 


Be 


Vtfj> i 


1 






A Vt \ ' ' 








i(\\ * 


J r 


# s 


1 1 J ' 




Xs\) ! 


a * * J 


o * * 


1 * 


a 




J • 


• # 


• 9 


■#■ 


-i- 


2? " 



quick and bright,Watch fire and light,Our clock just now struck ten. 

At one o'clock he sang: 

Ho, watchman ! Our clock is striking one. 
Oh, Jesus, wise and holy, 



40 THE OLD TOWN 

Help us our cross to bear. 

There is no one too lowly 

To be beneath thy care. 

Our clock strikes one ; in darkest night 

Oh, helpful friend, 

Thy comfort send, 

Then grows the burden light. 

The Old Town was the county-seat, and the 
county was large, but I do not remember that 
there were at any time more than two lawyers. 
One was good, the other bad. By bad I mean not 
that he was a bad lawyer, but reputed to be tricky, 
whereas the other was known to be honor itself. 
It is therefore perhaps the best character I can 
give my people when I record the fact — it was 
so stated, and I have not the least doubt that it 
was true — that when two farmers quarrelled, 
each sure that he was right, they made haste to 
hitch up to get first to the honest lawyer, and 
usually that was the end of the quarrel; for the 
last in the race was willing to make peace. They 
used to tell of two well-to-do neighbors who had 
fallen out over a line fence and started simulta- 
neously for town. Both had good teams, and 



THE OLD TOWN 41 

they were well matched in the race. For half an 
hour they drove silently alongside of one another, 
each on his own side of the road, grimly urging 
on their horses, but neither gaining a length. At 
last, as the lights of the town came into sight, 
for it was evening, a trace broke on one of the 
rigs and the horses stopped. The other team 
was whirled away in a cloud of dust. 

"Hans!" the beaten one called after him, and 
he halted and looked back. 

"Are you going after Lawyer ? " naming 

the square one. 

"I am that," came back. 

"Then let's go back. I am beat; " and back 
home they went and made it up. 

In contrast to this comedy of the highway 
stands in my memory a human tragedy that 
made a deep impression upon our childish minds, 
though we little understood at the time. There 
was in our street a public-house keeper with 
whose pretty daughter we played at our daily 
games until she grew out of short skirts into a 
very handsome but flashy young woman. After 



42 THE OLD TOWN 

a while she disappeared, and rumors reached the 
town that she was living in Hamburg upon the 
wages of sin, whereat the little circle in which 
she had spun her top buzzed mightily, and scan- 
dalized mammas turned up their noses with an 
"I told you so." Her mother went about red- 
eyed as if from much crying, but was rarely seen 
outside her house. As for the father, publican 
that he was, he said nothing, but grimly held 
his peace. 

Then one day a stylish carriage, the most 
elegant the town owned, drove up to the door of 
the public house, and a lady in silks and fur- 
belows, and with a mammoth ostrich-feather 
sweeping her shoulder, descended and went in. 
Like a storm wind the report spread through the 
street that Helene had come home a fine lady, 
and we boys gathered to see the carriage and the 
show. We were standing there when the door 
of the house was opened, and the publican and 
his daughter came out. She was weeping piti- 
fully, and the feather drooped sadly as he gave 
her his arm and, with face sternly set but with 



THE OLD TOWN 43 

the dignity of righteous fatherhood, led her to the 
carriage, helped her in, and, closing the door, 
bade the coachman drive on. At the window we 
caught a moment's glimpse of the mother's tear- 
ful face as the coach turned the corner; then 
the door closed, and we saw and heard no more. 
We knew, somehow, that a drama of human sin 
and sorrow had been enacted in our sight, but 
little else. Years after, I heard what had hap- 
pened within. She had come in her paint and 
her fripperies, unrepenting, to her old home; 
but barely within its shelter had been met by 
her father with the hard demand whether she 
was living honestly. 

" First answer me," he said, barring the way 
to her mother; "are you honest?" 

And when she was silent and hung her head, 
he led her forth, an outcast without her mother's 
kiss. The Old Town never saw her again. 

Happily the ordinary tenor of life there ran on 
a different plane. Neighborly kindness ruled; 
on the basis of the square deal, however : to every 
one his own. Stick up for your rights; these 



44 THE OLD TOWN 

secure, go any length to oblige a neighbor. It 
is a characteristic of the Danish people, who are 
essentially honest, intolerant of pretence, stub- 
bornly democratic, and withal good-natured to 
a degree. Hence their apparent passion for 
argument, which is all-pervading, but utterly 
harmless, excepting as it delays action. Busi- 
ness is held up ; trains appear sometimes to stop 
for argument between the station-master and 
conductor. When the whistle blows, they part 
with a nod and a cordial "Paa Gjensyn" — au 
revoir. When I was last there, I was a listener 
to a conversation between two men, strangers to 
one another, who were waiting for a train. The 
one had overheard the other tell his name and 
that of the town he hailed from. He turned 
upon him straightway: 

"Are you Christian Sorensen?" he demanded. 

"Yes." 

1 ' So you are that ? And you are from Hvillinge- 
bak." 

"Yes, I am that," patiently. 

"So — I thought there was only one Christian 



THE OLD TOWN 45 

Sorensen in Hvillingebak, and him / know," 
with strong emphasis on the " I." 

" Yes ! Well, my name is Jens Christian Soren- 
sen." 

Two minutes after I saw them taking a stein 
of beer together at the depot bar, on the friendliest 
of terms. 

Of such kind was the long-standing feud be- 
tween the factory owner in the Old Town and 
Knud Clausen, his next-door neighbor, who kept 
cows. Knud's manure heap, which was his 
wealth, for he had also a farm, was right under 
the other's dining-room window and was not nice, 
to put it mildly. The man of industry and 
wealth tried to buy it many a time and oft, but 
Knud would not sell ; not he, for in an unguarded 
moment the other had disputed his right to keep 
it there at all, and he was merely standing upon 
his undoubted rights. Had not his father kept 
it there before him? So it was a drawn battle, 
and the subject of many heart-burnings, until 
the Palm Sunday when the manufacturer's 
daughter went to confirmation. Knud loved 



46 THE OLD TOWN 

the ground she trod on, as did every one else in 
the Old Town, and sought a way of showing his 
good-will. He found it in the bone of contention 
in his back yard. When the family, returning 
from church, sat down to dinner, they beheld 
the offensive pile hidden entirely under a layer 
of grass and green leaves with daisies stuck in, 
like silver stars on a green carpet, and Knud 
himself beaming all over, presenting congratula- 
tions in mimic show. 

When the government undertook to replace 
the deadly slow old hymns that were sung in 
church on Sunday with some of more modern 
cast, and to that end introduced a new hymn- 
book, it came to a characteristic fight between 
the conservative countryfolk, who wanted no 
change, and their clergy carrying out the orders 
from headquarters. The peasants flatly refused 
to sing the new tunes. When the preceptor 
struck up one, they calmly sang the old and 
drowned him and the parson out. The battle 
raged for years before the new prevailed, just 
how I do not know. The government tried to 



THE OLD TOWN 47 

seize the old books and burn them, but it only 
made matters worse. Some compromise was 
made, without doubt, or they would be singing 
the old tunes to this day. 

The "stalwart Jutes" they called the country- 
folk round about the Old Town, and stalwart they 
are, as Germany is finding out trying to bend 
those south of the Konge-aa to her will. She 
may do it in Alsace and Lorraine perhaps, — I 
don't know, — but not with them. They will 
be Danes four hundred years hence, as they have 
been these forty under daily persecution. They 
will do nothing rash, but give in they never will. 
It is their way. Let me end this battlesome 
chapter, when I yearned only for peace, with 
the characteristic tale of my old friend Rosen- 
vinge, who was set to guard a prisoner in the war 
of '49. The man was a disloyal burgomaster 
or sheriff or something from one of the Schleswig 
towns, brought in by order of the government, 
to be kept and guarded in Ribe. Rosenvinge — 
may his shadow never grow less ! he lives yet, 
near the nineties if not in them, and goes his 



48 THE OLD TOWN 

daily rounds in the old cloister of which he is the 
keeper — Rosenvinge was the sentinel. The call 
for breakfast came after a night on the road, for 
suspects had to be taken by stealth and under 
cover of darkness. The sentinel was hungry. 
Never was man a hero without his porridge. 
No guard relief was in sight. There was but one 
way, and he took it. He put his gun in the 
corner with the prisoner, and went calmly across 
the street to the tavern, whence came the com- 
pelling savors of fried herring and hot Tvebak. 
Nor did he hurry himself over his coffee, but took 
his time. A soldier must have a good digestion, 
or he will have no stomach for the stern duties 
of war. Let it be recorded that he found his pris- 
oner faithfully guarding the gun when he came 
back and awaiting his turn at the herring. To 
disturb a man's breakfast by running away — if, 
indeed, it would have disturbed it — would have 
been dishonorable ; not to mention that thereby 
he would have lost his own. A square deal and 
nothing in haste was the good working plan of 
the Old Town. 




"He found his prisoner faithfully guarding the gun when 

he came back." 



CHAPTER III 









Our house 
was in Black 
Friars' Street, 
right around the 
corner from Peer 
Down's Slip in 
the picture. The 
Slip was a short 
cut to school 
for us boys, 
and we skipped 

" Eyes that spoke of things unseen t h r U gh i t 

BY THE CROWD." 

lightly enough, 
morning, noon, and evening. Mother never passed 
it, but always went the other way. It stood 
for the great sorrow of her life, for at the foot of 
it, where the river ran swiftly, my younger brother 
was drowned while at play. Theodore was ten. 

e 49 




50 THE OLD TOWN 

Though my mother had a house full, I do not 
believe she ever got over the shock of this first 
great trouble. To me it calls up two things which 
at the time caused me much wonderment. One 
was the strange consideration, even deference, 
with which I was treated by the boys who used 
to fight me and call me names, in the long week 
while they dragged the river for the body. Even 
my arch-enemy, Liar Hans, who skinned cats 
and hated me, let me alone. It gave me a queer 
feeling of being deserted and cast out which I 
made haste to get over when opportunity came. 
The other had somehow to do with this same 
experience, though I could not make out the 
connection. 

There was in the Old Town among the clergy 
attached to the Domkirke one with whom my 
father was on a war footing, so to speak. They 
were not enemies, for they were Christians. But 
Pastor Jacobi was a very bright and clever man 
with a caustic wit of which he was in no wise 
sparing. Father's mental equipment was not 
unlike his in those younger days, and they 




Peer Down's Slip. 



THE OLD TOWN 51 

clashed often, taking instinctively opposite sides 
in public discussion, until it had come to be under- 
stood, among us boys, at least, that they were not 
friends. Out of such a case we had an easy 
way; they, being men, could not fight and were 
forced to carry around their grievance unslaked. 
Hence my astonishment may be understood 
when, upon my father answering a knock at the 
door while we were together in the first burst of 
grief, I beheld Pastor Jacobi standing on the 
threshold. Without a word he opened his arms, 
and my father walked straight into them. So 
they stood and wept. As I looked at them stand- 
ing there, I felt that somehow, wholly irregular 
and incomprehensible as it was, something good 
had entered that house of mourning, a sweetness 
that took the sting out of our grief. They were 
ever after friends. 

The trees that hang over the wall of the Slip 
grew in the garden of our neighbor, Quedens, 
and our house abutted on it. We were his ten- 
ants. Herr Quedens was one of the solid mer- 
chants of the town. He was an old man as far 



52 



THE OLD TOWN 



back as I can remember, little, dried-up; but in 
the kind face with its mock seriousness that was 
in a perpetual struggle with the shrewd twinkle 

in eyes which 
saw ever the 
good in man 
and sought the 
way of helping 
it, the soul of 
the Old Town 
seems mirrored 
to me. If any 
one was in 
trouble or 
need, his path led straight to the Quedens' 
back door. Mr. Quedens himself would have 
barred the front door, that was in full sight of 
the town, with a severity which somehow without 
words managed to convey the message that at 
the other, in the narrow street around the cor- 
ner where no one was looking, there was a pitying 
soul that had balm for all wounds. And so there 
was ; for there Mrs. Quedens was in charge. Dear 




Neighbor Quedens. 



THE OLD TOWN 53 

old friends ! Sweet dreams be yours in your long 
sleep. The world seems poorer, the Old Town 
empty, without your gentle presence. It must 
be that even the Sunday service in the Dom- 
kirke is unreal without those good gray heads. 
His voice rose long and quavering from his seat 
on the men's side, always a bar behind the con- 
gregation; but he sang on undisturbed, finishing 
the hymn in his own good time and in his own 
way, which w r as not the way of earthly harmony ; 
but in the angels' choir it rises clear and sweet, 
I know. It was ever heavy upon my conscience 
that once, and only once, Mrs. Quedens expressed 
a desire to box my ears soundly. That was 
when my love-making had disconcerted the Old 
Town and fatally broken its peace. But even 
then she refrained ; and in his office Herr Quedens 
looked up a little later and pinched my arm with 
his quizzical look. "We must be patient, patient," 
he said, and somehow I felt that there was one 
who understood. 

It happened that Father and he had birthday 
together, and the eighteenth of March was the 



54 THE OLD TOWN 

great feast-day of both our houses. I think 
that the fact that Grover Cleveland was also 
born on that day helped on the great liking I had 
for the ex-President in his later years. On that 
day we gathered, old and young, around the board 
in the Quedens home and had a great time. 
Father invariably had a song which he had writ- 
ten for the occasion with special reference to the 
events of the year; as invariably to the great 
surprise of Mr. Quedens, who knew all about it, 
but never ceased to wonder loudly at these poetic 
achievements. No one was forgotten; there 
was a verse for every member of the family — 
theirs; not ours, it was too large, we should 
never have gotten through the dinner. As it 
was, the night-watchman's midnight verse usually 
came in and finished it, and we heard the tramp 
of his heavy boots at the gate as Mrs. Quedens 
disappeared from the table to see that he was not 
forgotten. 

Sunday evenings always saw a friendly gather- 
ing at their home, there being no vesper service 
in the Domkirke, since it could not be lighted. 



THE OLD TOWN 55 

We youngsters danced and played games. Our 
elders had a quiet rubber of whist, or gossiped 
over their knitting and the fine embroidery they 
did in those days. There was one article that 
went with the knitting pins which very recently 
I have seen come back, as a curiosity I suppose. 
It was an implement of polite use then — the 
scratching stick I mean. A slender rod with an 
ivory hand on its end, the fingers set "a-scratch." 
I can think of no better way of describing it. 
It was handy if a lady's back needed scratching, 
to reach down with, and no doubt it was the 
source of much solid comfort. When the watch- 
man cried ten, Mr. Quedens would look up from 
his whist and remark innocently: 

"Well, Anna, what do you say? I say when 
our company go home, we'll go to bed." The 
company took the hint. 

On the Monday morning preceding Lent we 
children had a game that reversed the usual order 
of things and was fine fun. We went around then 
and "whipped up" our friends with festive rods 
trimmed with colored paper rosettes. For being 



56 THE OLD TOWN 

caught in bed they were mulcted in many "boiler," 
a kind of sweetened bun, or else pennies. They 
made a point, of course, of staying in bed late, 
and cried piteously as we beat the feather beds 
with all our might. Mr. Quedens always cried 
loudest of all and begged for mercy in his droll 
half-German speech, while we gleefully laid it on 
all the harder. 

Across the main street from the Quedens home 
one of the two Jewish families in Ribe kept shop. 
They were quiet good people, popular with their 
neighbors, who took little account of the fact 
that they were Jews. The Old Town was not 
given to religious discussions, for good cause: 
with this exception it was all one way. There 
was not a Roman Catholic in the country, I 
think. Baptists we had heard of as sad heretics 
quite beyond the pale; Methodism was but a 
name. We were all Lutherans, and that as such 
we had a monopoly of the way of salvation fol- 
lowed, of course. 

So perhaps it was not so strange after all that 
Mrs. Tacchau should fall out with her life-long 



THE OLD TOWN 57 

friend, Mrs. Kerst, who was as stubbornly zeal- 
ous in her churchmanship as she was good and 
generous in her life. The Jewess had always 
known how to steer clear of the dangerous reef, 
but at last they struck it fair. 

"Well, well, dear friend/ ' said she, trying 
desperately to back away, "don't let us talk 
about it. Some day when we meet in heaven 
we shall know better." 

It was too much. Her friend absolutely 
bristled. 

"What! Our heaven? Indeed, no ! Here we 
can be friends, Mrs. Tacchau. But there — really, 
excuse me!" 

It has helped me over many a stile since to 
remember, that she really was a good woman. 
She was that. I have seldom known a better. 

Which brings me naturally to the good Dean 
of the Domkirke. Pastor Koch was my teacher 
in the Latin School when the blow fell that sepa- 
rated Denmark from her children south of the 
Konge-aa. His father had been the parish 
priest in Dostrup, one of the villages across the 



58 



THE OLD TOWN 



line, and his father before him, and so on through 
an unbroken chain back almost to the Reforma- 
tion. When the separation came, old Gabriel 

Koch moved 
to Ribe, rather 
than swear al- 
legiance to the 
conquerors, 
and died of a 
broken heart. 
There messen- 
gers from the 
old parish 
found his son, 
then in orders, and bade him come to them. 
His church, his people needed him, they said. 
The parish was Danish despite the German oc- 
cupation and would always remain so. The 
change of allegiance would be a mere matter of 
form. Would he come ? They were waiting and 
yearning for the son of the old house. 

They pleaded long and earnestly, but he stood 
firm. He could not take oath to serve the ene- 




The Good Dean of the Domkirke. 



THE OLD TOWN 59 

mies of his country. When the men from Dostrup 
went back over the line, Pastor Koch stood at the 
South-gate, shading his eyes with his hands, and 
followed their retreating forms until they van- 
ished in the sunset. He had brought the last 
sacrifice, forever closing the door upon his life- 
dream, that of filling the pulpit of his fathers. 
To the day of his death, I think, he never ceased 
to look southward with a yearning that had no 
words. And from below the line longing eyes 
were directed, are yet, toward the square tower 
of the Domkirke with the white cross on red 
waving from its top. Like him, they are men 
who never forget. 

It is the way, I guess, of the Old Town. Last 
year, when I was within a day's journey of it, 
travelling toward Denmark, news reached me 
that an old friend had gone to her long home. 
Mrs. Hansen was the wife of the " middle-miller," 
for there were three on the three branches of 
the river. It was at her door I bade good-by 
to my mother when I went into the great world, 
and it was she who comforted her, Mother told 



60 



THE OLD TOWN 



me in after years, with the assurance that " Jacob 
will come back President of the new country, 
see if he doesn't." Nor did she ever forget the 

wanderer, but 
always hailed 
his return with 
gladness. Her 
boy rode with 
me in that post- 
chaise. He was 
going in to serve 
the King as a 
soldier. We had 
sat on the 
school bench to- 
gether and 
fought together, to the loss of much learning, I 
fear, and to the loss of caste, too, with our teacher. 
But it befell that, when we met again under his 
mother's roof, when our hair that was brown had 
grown grizzled and gray, she saw us both distin- 
guished by old King Christian as the two of our 
class who had made it proud. And she smiled a 




The Wife of the Middle-miller. 



THE OLD TOWN 



61 



calm "I told you so." But that is another story, 
and we shall come to it. 

The people of the Old Town were like itself, 
simple and honest and good. None of them ever 
plumed them- 



selves with stolen 
feathers. There 
was a bell-ringer 
at the Domkirke 
whom we boys 
dubbed Venus be- 
cause of her ex- 
ceeding ugliness. 
She was certainly 
the most hideous 
and withal the 
most good-na- 
tured girl I ever 
met. She a c- 




Venus. 



cepted the name meekly as a part of her office, 
something pertaining to the job, and her smile 
reached from ear to ear when we hailed her by it 
in the street. Then there was a change. Her 



62 THE OLD TOWN 

employer died, and she lost her place. When 
next we met her and called her Venus, she pro- 
tested soberly : 

"I ain't Venus no more now, for I ain't by the 
kirk." 

She ought logically to have descended from her 
ecclesiastical position to civil employment as 
the town bell- wo man, but I am not sure she did. 
All public advertising was done in the Old Town 
through the medium of either the bell-woman or 
the drummer-man, the two official town- criers. 
There was a newspaper, to be sure, — indeed, it 
had been there for a hundred years and more, 
" privileged by the King," — but I think it came 
out only every other day. At all events, all 
matters of real human interest were promulgated 
through these two functionaries. They divided 
their duties fairly. She did the crying of fish 
and meat in the market, and such like, or if any 
one had lost anything. He, having been once a 
soldier, did the honors on ceremonial occasions, 
as when a fat steer, or a horse, was to be killed 
at the butcher's, good horse-meat being neither 



^»u«ia»AK-':'»-«»jw,swy:: 







Did the honors on ceremonial occasions." 



THE OLD TOWN 63 

unwelcome on the poor man's table, nor unpala- 
table either. Then he led the procession through 
the town, proclaiming between rolls of his drum 
the virtues of the victim that stalked after, 
adorned with ribbons and flowers. The steer 
never took any interest in the proceedings. Per- 
haps a bovine tradition told it what was coming. 
But the horse took it all as a compliment, and 
walked in the procession with pride, as if he were 
a person of consequence. 

Of characters the Old Town had had a full 
supply ever since the days when Anders Sorensen 
Vedel, who was a cleric attached to the Dom- 
kirke, translated Saxo Grammaticus with the 
Hamlet Saga into Danish from the original 
Latin. Being in straits for paper on which to 
print it, he called upon the Danish women through 
his friend, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, to 
send their linen to the paper-mill lest the great 
work be lost to posterity. Vedel was a pious 
as well as a famous man, and it was his custom, 
in order to impress his children with the bitter- 
ness of the Passion, to call them into his study 



64 THE OLD TOWN 

on Good Friday and scourge them soundly. 
The scourge had no longer any pertinent relation 
to Good Friday in our day, though it was busy 
enough the year round. It helped us on our way 
to knowledge, or was supposed to, in the school, 
where " Spare the rod and spoil the child" was 
still an article of unquestioned faith. There 
was an evil tradition that a king in the early part 
of the century had once, on a visit, expressed 
wonder at the number of great and learned men 
that had come from it, and that the Rector had 
told him: "We have a little birch forest near, 
your Majesty. It helps, it helps ! " It certainly 
labored faithfully. As to the results — but prob- 
ably it is a subject without interest to my young 
readers, and since their elders have lost faith in 
it I shall let it alone, and be glad to. 

Liar Hans, whom I spoke of, was one of the 
institutions of the town, along with Maren Dra- 
goon, the apple woman, the memory of whose 
early flirtation with a dragoon — she was sixty 
and had a beard when I knew her — was thus 
perpetuated, and Hop-Carolina ; so called because 



THE OLD TOWN 



65 



one of her legs was shorter than the other. How 
and why Hans got his nickname, I don't know. 
I know that he 
hated us, probably 
for yelling it at 
him, and that he 
compelled me for 
a long time to go 
armed with a horse- 
whip for fear of 
him. The Liar 
was a professional 
skinner of cats. 
Women wore 
tanned catskins in 
those days as we 
wear chamois chest 
protectors, with 
the hairy side in, 
and this demand 
Liar Hans supplied. 

So he went about with a sack with dead cats in it, 
and from this brought up his ammunition when 




$*&(£, 



66 THE OLD TOWN 

a fight befell, as it did whenever one of the Latin 
School boys hove in sight. Then the air was 
filled with cats that went back and forth till we 
ran; for Hans did not know the word surrender. 
He cornered me once in our own street, and there 
ensued a mighty combat between the Liar and his 
cats on one side, and myself and Othello, my 
dog, on the other, in which my horsewhip did 
great execution until we fled in disorderly re- 
treat and got wedged in the doorway, the dog and 
I, where Hans laid it on both of us with a cat he 
had by the tail. My mother's exclamation of 
horror, as she came out to see what was the 
matter, set us free at last. 

I have forgotten the name of the man who 
lived just out of town and kept bees. I can- 
not even remember whether he occupied the old 
manse at Lustrup or the Dam-house. It was one 
of them, I know. The thing I do remember is 
the shift he made to tend his bees without getting 
up with the sun as did they. The honey they 
gather on the heath when the broom is purple 
has a wild flavor which nothing can match, but 



THE OLD TOWN 67 

it is essential that they shall be about it early, 
while the morning sun is on the heather. For 
some reason they closed the hives at night, and 
some one had to open them at sunrise. The 
keeper was fond of lying late in bed, and it was 
laziness in this instance that was the mother of 
invention. He kept hens also, and their coop 
adjoined the hives. They were early risers too; 
he heard them jump down from their roosts when 
he ought to be out tending his bees. So he hit 
upon a contrivance, a sort of lever under the 
roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it, 
opened the hives and let the bees out. After 
that he could lie in bed and laugh while his hus- 
bandry went on. He was the only inventor I 
ever knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you 
count in the telegrapher who came when the 
wires had been strung to our coast. He was a 
lonesome, morose man, fond of taking long walks 
by himself. On one of his tramps a vagrant dog 
attached itself to him, and the two became friends. 
The telegrapher had the notion, however, that a 
well-behaved dog must trot obediently at its 



68 THE OLD TOWN 

master's heels, and that he could not make his 
dog do. So he kept him half-starved, and when 
he went out, tied a piece of meat to the end of his 
stick. After that they were always seen together 
in the orthodox way, the dog sniffing industriously 
in his tracks as he strode along, looking neither 
to the right nor to the left. He was a very thin 
and ungainly man, who could look over a six- 
foot fence without standing on his toes, and the 
procession through the town was most singular. 
Of course we dubbed him "the Bone." 

The old bookseller was there, whose birthday 
was a movable feast. The date had been lost, 
and as it was somewhere in the spring and he 
liked Whitsuntide, anyhow, he kept it on that 
Sunday, whenever it came. It was something 
to have even the sun get up and dance on your 
birthday. Perhaps that persuaded him. It was 
the tradition that you could see the sun skip for 
joy on the holy morning very early, in that 
latitude. Most people took the dance on trust 
and stayed in bed. And we had the funny Ger- 
man shoemaker whose bills were the gems of the 



THE OLD TOWN 69 

town. The one he sent to the factory owner's 
wife, who was a very fine and aristocratic lady, 
became its great classic. It ran thus : 
"En Paar Stiefel 

" Die Madame — Verschnudelt und hinterge- 
flickt." * 

There used to be a Postmaster in the Old Town 
who had a very quick and violent temper. The 
post-chaise was upset once when he was the only 
passenger, and in such a way that he was im- 
prisoned within it and unable to open the door. 
He called in vain for help; the driver did not 
come. At that his gorge rose, and he shrieked 
angrily: "Niels! Niels! Where are you? Come 
at once." 

"I cannot, Mr. Postmaster," Niels' voice spoke 
patiently from the ditch. "I am lying here with 
a broken leg." 

"Hang your leg," yelled the angry man, from 
the chaise; "come at once, I tell you. I am 
lying here with a broken neck." 

I was thinking less of the unreasonable Post- 

1 The Madam — Patched before and behind. 



70 THE OLD TOWN 

master than of the just anger of the district 
physician, who one day was called to deal with an 
emergency in a near-by farm-house, where all 
depended on letting in fresh air quickly. The 
patient lay in one of the horrible closet beds that 
always gave me a shiver, though they were often 
not so bad, if only there were not mice in the 
straw. Air there never was, could not be. The 
doctor ran to the window and tried to open it. 
It was nailed down; probably had not been 
opened since the house was built. Dr. P. was a 
hasty man, too, and here he had reason, for no 
time was to be lost. Looking around for some- 
thing to smash the window with, his eye fell 
upon the farmer's silver-mounted meerschaum 
pipe, with a bowl as big as a man's fist and long 
elastic stem. The doctor seized it and, wielding 
it as a war club, smashed pane after pane and 
saved his patient. But the farmer sued him. 
The pipe was an heirloom and beyond price to 
him. It was the one thing that by the country- 
folk was valued higher than lands and cattle. 
The doctor lost his case, but he took the occasion 



THE OLD TOWN 71 

to inveigh effectually against the evil abuse of 
the cupboard beds that were closed tight with 
doors as often as with a curtain. When this last 
was so, it was rather to save the wood than the 
sleeper. And he lived to see them put under the 
ban, and to see windows made to open. 

The pipe was, indeed, an indispensable part of 
the peasant's equipment. The boy of twelve 
had his sticking out of his side pocket, just like 
his father. They never stopped smoking except 
when they were haying, and I have seen a man 
mowing grass with his long pipe hanging from his 
mouth. They even counted distances by pipes in- 
stead of miles. A peasant would tell you, if you 
asked how far it was to the next town, that it 
was two pipes, or three pipes, as the case might 
be. How far that was, I have forgotten, but it 
was a safe enough way of reckoning. For they 
went always at the same jog-trot, and the pipe- 
bowls were always of the same size. They were 
of porcelain and gayly decorated. Among the 
young men there was a kind of rivalry as to who 
should have the handsomest pipe bowl; the 



72 THE OLD TOWN 

meerschaum was the holiday pipe, for home and 
festive occasions. And it was not only the 
country folk who smoked thus. Everybody did 
— the men, that is to say. It is only lately the 
women have taken to smoking cigars, and in 
public. When last I crossed the " Great Belt" 
on the steam-ferry, I was greatly annoyed at the 
sight of two handsome and otherwise nice young 
girls smoking cigarettes on the deck, and I took 
occasion to say so to a motherly woman who 
occupied the chair next to mine. She listened 
with polite interest to my diatribe about how 
things were when I was a boy, and when I had 
finished took out a cigar, a regular man's cigar. 

"Yes!" she said, "things do change. Now, 
I like a smoke myself. These girls take after me, 
I suppose. They are my daughters." And she 
struck a match and lit her weed. 

We boys in the Old Town were strictly pro- 
hibited from smoking under the school rules, 
which prescribed the rod for every such offence. 
In consequence, we did it on the sly, thinking it 
manly and fine. At his desk, at home, Father 



THE OLD TOWN 73 

smoked all the time, and so did everybody else. 
Many a pound of Kanaster have I carried home 
from the tobacconist's shop, the one in Gron- 
negade with the naked brown Indian smoking a 
very long pipe. From the moment the " Last of 
the Mohicans" fell into my hands I looked 
upon him as friend and brother. There was 
something between us which the grown-ups knew 
nothing about. He must be acquainted with 
Uncas and Chingachgook and Deerslayer, of 
course, for clearly he was of the good Delawares 
and not of the wicked Hurons. He swings from 
his hook yet, and I confess to a nodding ac- 
quaintance when I pass him in the street. His 
pipe is still the biggest part of him. 

It was a part of everything. I mind many a 
time seeing our family doctor on the way to a 
country case, wrapped in his great fur coat and 
with the pipe between his teeth as he sat in his 
wagon chair. That was a still bigger part of the 
doctor's outfit : the great easy-chair that stood in 
the hall and was lifted into the farmer's wagon 
where it hung suspended from the sideboards. 



74 THE OLD TOWN 

Farm wagons in those days were not made with 
springs. With his collar up about his ears, his 
cap pulled down and "fire up," the doctor could 
sleep comfortably on the longest and coldest ride, 
and he had need. For there were few nights 
when he was not called out for one. It was hard 
work for very poor pay. Father, with a family 
of fifteen and errand for the doctor every day, 
and sometimes all day, paid our family physi- 
cian, I think, not over fifty daler a year, which 
is half that in American dollars. But it was not 
a matter of dollars. Money could not pay what 
our doctor gave us. He was the family friend 
before he was the physician. He smoothed the 
pillow of suffering, and the last agony was made 
easier because he sat by. Grown old and slow of 
gait, he goes his rounds yet in the Old Town that 
will be my Old Town no longer when I look for 
him in vain on his morning route. And where he 
goes, to the rich man's house or the poor man's 
hut, sunshine and hope come with him. 

I have said that in Ribe one seemed to be 
always bordering upon the way past because of 




tsiLffi^ 



The Old Family Doctor. 



THE OLD TOWN 75 

the track it had made everywhere, the many 
landmarks it had set. There was another reason ; 
namely, that so many old people lived there who 
in themselves made a link connecting the town 
with days long gone. Their lives seemed to 
reach straight back and lay hold of it visibly. 
People grew older in the Old Town than anywhere 
I know of, as if they were loath to let go of it. 
There seemed to be no good reason why they 
should die, and so they lived and lived, and some 
of them are living yet. The old Bishop, whom 
we all loved and revered, was 92 when I saw him 
vault with the agility of a young man over a 
beam some carpenters had left in his way. He 
was the father-in-law of Dr. Niels Finsen, whom 
all the world knows. Dr. Finsen's father was 
Amtmand in Ribe in his day, and his picture in 
uniform hangs in the Town Hall. Bishop Balslev 
and King Christian had grown old together, and 
were friends. When the Bishop thought his 
charge required a younger man, he asked the 
King to appoint his successor. "Not while I 
live/' said the King, and he kept his word. He 



76 THE OLD TOWN 

outlived his friend, who was in sight of the 
century post when his relief came. 

There was scarce a street in the Old Town where 
some kindly old face did not look out upon you 
with patient eyes that spoke of things unseen by 
the crowd, of friends long waiting in the beyond. 
In the Cloister 1 there were always one or two old 
women that were nearing the hundred. The 
keeper himself was in the nineties. They crept 
about, the old men with their staffs in the sun- 
shiny garden patches; the women sat at their 
curtained windows, busy with sewing or knitting. 
For there were ever small trousers to be patched 
and small feet to be shod with warm socks for 
the winter, if not in their own home then in many 
a one about them. And the Old Town loved 
them. Some day we heard that they slept, and 
we bound wreaths for our friends and strewed the 

1 The old building was a hospital for centuries after the 
Reformation drove out the monks, and for a season served as 
an insane asylum. We children used to steal up to the tarred 
board fence that enclosed its grounds and, gluing our eyes to 
a knot hole, shudder deliriously at the sight of the poor 
wretches. It was eventually turned into an Old Ladies Home, 
and the name of the " Cloister " was restored to it. 



THE OLD TOWN 



77 



street with wintergreen and spruce, and walked, 
singing, their last journey with them, while all the 
church bells rang and friends carried the tired body. 




"They crept about, the old men with their staffs." 

"Ashes to ashes — dust to dust." 

But there was no pain in the parting, for in the 
living there had been no discord. The welcome 
of the grave was peace. 



CHAPTER IV 



I do not know 
how the forty 
years I have been 
away have dealt 
with "Jule-nis- 
sen/' the Christ- 
mas elf of my 
childhood. He 
was pretty old 
then, gray and 
bent, and there 
were signs that 
his time was 
nearly over. So 
it may be that 
they have laid 
him away. I 
shall find out 
when I go over there next time. When I 
was a boy we never sat down to our Christmas 
Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had 

78 




^£Tibu»w 



The Christmas Sheaf. 



THE OLD TOWN 79 

been taken up to the attic, where he lived with 
the marten and its young, and kept an eye upon 
the house — saw that everything ran smoothly. I 
never met him myself, but I know the house-cat 
must have done so. No doubt they were well 
acquainted; for when in the morning I went in 
for the bowl, there it was, quite dry and licked 
clean, and the cat purring in the corner. So, 
being there all night, he must have seen and 
likely talked with him. 

I suspect, as I said, that they have not treated 
my Nisse fairly in these matter-of-fact days that 
have come upon us, not altogether for our own 
good, I fear. I am not even certain that they 
were quite serious about him then, though to 
my mind that was very unreasonable. But then 
there is nothing so unreasonable to a child as the 
cold reason of the grown-ups. However, if they 
have gone back on him, I know where to find 
him yet. Only last Christmas when I talked of 
him to the tenement-house mothers in my Henry 
Street Neighborhood House, 1 — all of them from 

1 The Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, New York. 



80 THE OLD TOWN 

the ever faithful isle, — I saw their eyes light up 
with the glad smile of recognition, and half a 
dozen called out excitedly, "The Little People! 
the Leprecawn ye mean, we know him well," and 
they were not more pleased than I to find that 
we had an old friend in common. For the Nisse, 
or the Leprecawn, call him whichever you like, 
was a friend indeed to those who loved kindness 
and peace. If there was a house in which con- 
tention ruled, either he would have nothing to 
do with it, like the stork that built its nest on 
the roof, or else he paid the tenants back in their 
own coin, playing all kinds of tricks upon them 
and making it very uncomfortable. I suppose 
it was this trait that gave people, when they 
began to reason so much about things, the notion 
that he was really the wraith, as it were, of their 
own disposition, which was not so at all. I re- 
member the story told of one man who quarrelled 
with everybody, and in consequence had a very 
troublesome Nisse in the house that provoked 
him to the point of moving away; which he did. 
But as the load of furniture was going down the 




The Nisse. 



THE OLD TOWN 81 

street, with its owner hugging himself in glee at 
the thought that he had stolen a march on the 
Nisse, the little fellow poked his head out of 
the load and nodded to him, "We are moving 
to-day.' 7 At which naturally he flew into a great 
rage. But then, that was just a story. 

The Nisse was of the family, as you see, very 
much of it, and certainly not to be classed with 
the cattle. Yet they were his special concern; 
he kept them quiet, and saw to it, when the stable- 
man forgot, that they were properly bedded and 
cleaned and fed. He was very well known to 
the hands about the farm, and they said that he 
looked just like a little old man, all in gray and 
with a pointed red nightcap and long gray beard. 
He was always civilly treated, as he surely de- 
served to be, but Christmas was his great holiday, 
when he became part of it, indeed, and was made 
much of. So, for that matter, was everything 
that lived under the husbandman's roof, or within 
reach of it. The farmer always set a lighted 
candle in his window on Christmas Eve, to guide 
the lonesome wanderer to a hospitable hearth. 



82 THE OLD TOWN 

The very sparrows that burrowed in the straw 
thatch, and did it no good, were not forgotten. 
A sheaf of rye was set out in the snow for them, 
so that on that night at least they should have 
shelter and warmth unchallenged, and plenty to 
eat. At all other times we were permitted to raid 
their nests and help ourselves to a sparrow roast, 
which was by long odds the greatest treat we had. 
Thirty or forty of them, dug out of any old thatch 
roof by the light of the stable lantern and stuffed 
into Ane's long stocking, which we had borrowed 
for a game-bag, made a meal for the whole family, 
each sparrow a fat mouthful. Ane was the cook, 
and I am very certain that her pot-roast of spar- 
row would pass muster at any Fifth Avenue 
restaurant as the finest dish of reed-birds that 
ever was. However, at Christmas their sheaf 
was their sanctuary, and no one as much as 
squinted at them. Only last winter when Christ- 
mas found me stranded in a little Michigan town, 
wandering disconsolate about the streets, I came 
across such a sheaf raised on a pole in a door- 
yard, and I knew at once that one of my people 



THE OLD TOWN 83 

lived in that house and kept Yule in the old 
way. So I felt as if I were not quite a stranger. 
All the animals knew perfectly well that the 
holiday had come, and kept it in their way. The 
watch-dog was unchained. In the midnight hour 
on the Holy Eve the cattle stood up in their stalls 
and bowed out of respect and reverence for Him 
who was laid in a manger when there was no room 
in the inn, and in that hour speech was given them, 
and they talked together. Claus, our neighbor's 
man, had seen and heard it, and every Christmas 
Eve I meant fully to go and be there when it 
happened ; but always long before that I had been 
led away to bed, a very sleepy boy, with all my 
toys hugged tight, and when I woke up the day- 
light sh6ne through the frosted window-panes, 
and they were blowing good morning from the 
church tower; it would be a whole year before 
another Christmas. So I vowed, with a sigh at 
having neglected a really sacred observance, that 
I would be there sure on the next Christmas Eve. 
But it was always so, every year, and perhaps it 
was just as well, for Claus said that it might go 



84 THE OLD TOWN 

ill with the one who listened, if the cows found 
him out. 

Blowing in the Yule from the grim old tower 
that had stood eight hundred years against the 
blasts of the North Sea was one of the customs 
of the Old Town that abide, however it fares with 
the Nisse; that I know. At sun-up, while yet 
the people were at breakfast, the town band 
climbed the many steep ladders to the top of 
the tower, and up there, in fair weather or foul, — 
and sometimes it blew great guns from the wintry 
sea, — they played four old hymns, one to each 
corner of the compass, so that no one was for- 
gotten. They always began with Luther's sturdy 
challenge, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," while 
down below we listened devoutly. There was 
something both weird and beautiful about those 
far-away strains in the early morning light of the 
northern winter, something that was not of earth 
and that suggested to my child's imagination the 
angels' song on far Judean hills. Even now T , 
after all these years, the memory of it does that. 
It could not have been because the music was so 







" Blowing in Yule from the grim old tower." 



THE OLD TOWN 85 

rare, for the band was made up of small store- 
keepers and artisans who thus turned an honest 
penny on festive occasions. Incongruously 
enough, I think, the official town mourner who 
bade people to funerals was one of them. It 
was like the burghers y guard, the colonel of 
which — we thought him at least a general, 
because of the huge brass sword he trailed when 
he marched at the head of his men — was the 
town tailor, a very small but very martial man. 
But whether or no, it was beautiful. I have 
never heard music since that so moved me. When 
the last strain died away came the big bells with 
their deep voices that sang far out over field and 
heath, and our Yule was fairly under way. 

A whole fortnight we kept it. Ileal Christmas 
was from Little Christmas Eve, which was the 
night before the Holy Eve proper, till New 
Year. Then there was a week of supplemen- 
tary festivities before things slipped back into 
their wonted groove. That was the time of 
parties and balls. The great ball of the year 
was on the day after Christmas. Second Christ- 



86 THE OLD TOWN 

mas Day we called it, when all the quality 
attended at the club-house, where the Amtmand 
and the Burgomaster, the Bishop and the Rec- 
tor of the Latin School, did the honors and 
received the people. That was the grandest of 
the town functions. The school ball, late in 
autumn, was the j oiliest, for then the boys in- 
vited each the girl he liked best, and the 
older people were guests and outsiders, so to 
speak. The Latin School, still the " Cathedral 
School," was as old as the Domkirke itself, and 
when it took the stage it was easily first while it 
lasted. The Yule ball, though it was a rather 
more formal affair, for all that was neither stiff 
nor tiresome ; nothing was in the Old Town ; there 
was too much genuine kindness for that. And 
then it was the recognized occasion when matches 
were made by enterprising mammas, or by the 
young themselves, and when engagements were 
declared and discussed as the great news of the 
day. We heard of all those things afterward 
and thought a great fuss was being made over 
nothing much. For when a young couple were 



THE OLD TOWN 87 

declared engaged, that meant that there was no 
more fun to be got out of them. They were 
given, after that, to go mooning about by them- 
selves and to chasing us children away when we 
ran across them; until they happily returned to 
their senses, got married, and became reasonable 
human beings once more. 

When we had been sent to bed on the great 
night, Father and Mother went away in their 
Sunday very best, and we knew they would not 
return until two o'clock in the morning, a fact 
which alone invested the occasion with unwonted 
gravity, for the Old Town kept early hours. At 
ten o'clock, when the watchman droned his sleepy 
lay, absurdly warning the people to 

Be quick and bright, 
Watch fire and light, 
Our clock it has struck ten, 

it was ordinarily tucked in and asleep. But 
that night we lay awake a long time listening to 
the muffled sound of heavy wheels in the snow 
rolling unceasingly past, and trying to picture 
to ourselves' the grandeur they conveyed. Every 



88 THE OLD TOWN 

carriage in the town was then in use and 
doing overtime. I think there were as many 
as four. 

When we were not dancing or playing games, 
we literally ate our way through the two holiday 
weeks. Pastry by the mile did we eat, and gen- 
eral indigestion brooded over the town when it 
emerged into the white light of the new year. 
At any rate it ought to have done so. It is a 
prime article of faith with the Danes to this day 
that for any one to go out of a friend's house, or 
of anybody's house, in the Christmas season with- 
out partaking of its cheer, is to "bear away their 
Yule," which no one must do on any account. 
Every house was a bakery from the middle of 
December until Christmas Eve, and oh ! the 
quantities of cakes we ate, and such cakes ! We 
were sixteen normally, in our home, and Mother 
mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable 
horse-trough kept for that exclusive purpose. 
As much as a sack of flour went in, I guess, and 
gallons of molasses and whatever else went to 
the mixing. For weeks there had been long 



THE OLD TOWN 89 

and anxious speculations as to "what Father 
would do/' and gloomy conferences between him 
and Mother over the state of the family pocket- 
book, which was never plethoric ; but at last the 
joyful message ran through the house from attic 
to kitchen that the appropriation had been made, 
"even for citron/ ' which meant throwing all care 
to the winds. The thrill of it, when we children 
stood by and saw the generous avalanche going 
into the trough ! What would not come out of 
it ! The whole family turned to and helped make 
the cakes and cut the " pepper-nuts/ ' which were 
little squares of spiced cake-dough we played 
cards for and stuffed our pockets with, gnawing 
them incessantly. Talk about eating between 
meals: ours was a continuous performance for 
two solid weeks. The pepper-nuts were the real 
staple of Christmas to us children. We paid 
forfeits with them in the game of scratch-nose 
(jackstraws), when the fellow fishing for his straw 
stirred the others and had his nose scratched with 
the little file in the bunch as extra penalty; in 
"Under which tree lies my pig ?" in which the pig 



90 THE OLD TOWN 

was a pepper-nut, the fingers of the closed hands 
the trees ; and in Black Peter. In this last the 
loser had his nose blackened with the snuff from 
the candle until advancing civilization substi- 
tuted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper- 
nuts would have been a hollow mockery indeed. 
We rolled the dough in long strings like slender 
eels and then cut it, a little on the bias. They 
were good, those nuts, when baked brown. I 
wish I had some now. 

It all stood for the universal desire that in the 
joyous season everybody be made glad. I know 
that in the Old Town no one went hungry or cold 
during the holidays, if indeed any one ever did. 
Every one gave of what he had, and no one was 
afraid of pauperizing anybody by his gifts, for 
they were given gladly and in love, and that 
makes all the difference — did then and does 
now. At Christmas it is perfectly safe to let 
our scientific principles go and just remember 
the Lord's command that we love one another. 
I subscribe to them all with perfect loyalty, and 
try to practise them till Christmas week comes 



THE OLD TOWN 91 

in with its holly and the smell of balsam and fir, 
and the memories of childhood in the Old Town ; 
then — well, anyway, it is only a little while. 
New Year and the long cold winter come soon 
enough. 

Christmas Eve was, of course, the great and 
blessed time. That was the one night in the year 
when in the gray old Domkirke services were held 
by candle-light. A myriad wax candles twinkled 
in the gloom, but did not dispel it. It lingered 
under the great arches where the voice of the 
venerable minister, the responses of the con- 
gregation, and above it all the boyish treble of 
the choir billowed and strove, now dreamily 
with the memories of ages past, now sharply, 
tossed from angle to corner in the stone walls, 
and again in long thunderous echoes, sweeping 
all before it on the triumphant strains of the 
organ, like a victorious army with banners crowd- 
ing through the halls of time. So it sounded to 
me, as sleep gently tugged at my eyelids. The 
air grew heavy with the smell of evergreens and 
of burning wax, and as the thunder of war drew 



92 THE OLD TOWN 

farther and farther away, in the shadow of the 
great pillars stirred the phantoms of mailed 
knights whose names were hewn in the grave- 
stones there. We youngsters clung to the skirts 
of Mother as we went out and the great doors 
fell to behind us. And yet those Christmas 
Eves, with Mother's gentle eyes forever in- 
separable from them, and with the glad cries 
of Merry Christmas ringing all about, have left 
a touch of sweet peace in my heart which all 
the years have not effaced, nor ever will. 

At home the great dinner of the year was wait- 
ing for us: roast goose stuffed with apples and 
prunes, rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar on 
it, and a great staring butter eye in the middle. 
The pudding was to lay the ground- work with, and 
it was served in deep soup-plates. It was the 
dish the Nisse came in on, and the cat. On New 
Year's Eve both these were left out ; but to make 
up for it an almond was slipped into the "grod," 
and whoever found it in his plate got a present. 
It was no device to make people "fletch," but it 
served the purpose admirably. At Christmas we 



*$£& 




m 




r 



The whole family turned to and helped." 



THE OLD TOWN 93 

had doughnuts after the goose, big and stout and 
good. However I managed it, I don't know, 
but it is a tradition in the family, and I remember 
it well, that I once ate thirteen on top of the big 
dinner. Evidently I was having a good time. 
Dinner was, if not the chief end of man, at least 
an item in his make-up, and a big one. 1 

When it had had time to settle and all the 
kitchen work was done, Father took his seat 
at the end of the long table, with all the house- 
hold gathered about, the servants included and 
the baby without fail, and read the story of The 
Child: "And it came to pass in those days," 
while Mother hushed the baby. Then we sang 
together "A Child is Born in Bethlehem," which 
was the simplest of our hymns, and also the one 
we children loved best, for it told of how in heaven 
we were to walk to church 

On sky-blue carpets, star-bedeckt, 

1 The reader who is not afraid of dyspepsia by suggestion 
may consider the following Christmas bill of fare which ob- 
tained among the peasants east of the Old Town : On a large 
trencher a layer of pork and ribs, on top of that a nest of fat 
sausages, in which sat a roast duck. 



94 THE OLD TOWN 

which was a great comfort. Children love beauti- 
ful things, and we had few of them. The great 
and precious treasure in our house was the rag 
carpet in the spare room which we were allowed 
to enter only on festive occasions such as Christ- 
mas. It had an orange streak in it which I can 
see to this day. Whenever I come across one 
that even remotely suggests it, it gives me yet 
a kind of solemn feeling. We had no piano, — 
that was a luxury in those days, — and Father 
was not a singer, but he led on bravely with his 
tremulous bass and we all joined in, Ane the 
cook and Maria the housemaid furtively wiping 
their eyes with their aprons, for they were good 
and pious folk and this was their Christmas ser- 
vice. So we sang the ten verses to end, with 
their refrain "Hallelujah! hallelujah/' that al- 
ways seemed to me to open the very gates of 
Yule. 

And it did, literally; for when the last hal- 
lelujah died away the door of the spare room was 
flung wide and there stood the Christmas tree, 
all shining lights, and the baby was borne in, 




We joined hands and danced around the tree." 



THE OLD TOWN 95 

wide-eyed, to be the first, as was proper ; for was 
not this The Child's holiday ? Unconsciously we 
all gave way to those who were nearest Him, who 
had most recently come from His presence and 
were therefore in closest touch with the spirit of 
the holiday. So, when we joined hands and 
danced around the tree, Father held the baby, and 
we laughed and were happy as the little one 
crowed his joy and stretched the tiny arms tow- 
ard the light. 

Light and shadow, joy and sorrow, go hand in 
hand in the world. While we danced and made 
merry, there was one near for whom Christmas 
was but grief and loss. Out in the white fields 
he went from farm to farm, a solitary wanderer, 
the folklore had it, looking for plough or harrow on 
which to rest his weary limbs. It was the Wan- 
dering Jew, to whom this hope was given, that, 
if on that night of all in the year he could find 
some tool used in honest toil over which the sign 
of the cross had not been made, his wanderings 
would be at an end and the curse depart from 
him, to cleave thenceforward to the luckless 



96 THE OLD TOWN 

farmer. 1 He never found what he sought in my 
time. The thrifty husbandman had been over 
his field on the eve of the holiday with a watch- 
ful eye to his coming. When the bell in the dis- 
tant church tower struck the midnight hour, 
belated travellers heard his sorrowful wail as he 
fled over the heath and vanished. 

When Ansgarius preached the White Christ 
to the vikings of the North, so runs the legend 
of the Christmas tree, the Lord sent His three 
messengers, Faith, Hope, and Love, to help light 
the first tree. Seeking one that should be high 
as hope, wide as love, and that bore the sign of 
the cross on every bough, they chose the balsam 
fir, which best of all the trees in the forest met the 
requirements. Perhaps that is a good reason why 
there clings about the Christmas tree in my old 
home that which has preserved it from being 
swept along in the flood of senseless luxury that 
has swamped so many things in our money-mad 

1 An unromantic variation of this was the belief that the 
farmer who left his plough out on Christmas would get a 
drubbing from his wife within a twelvemonth. I hope who- 
ever held to that got what he richly deserved. 



THE OLD TOWN 97 

day. At least so it was then. Every time I see 
a tree studded with electric lights, garlands of 
tinsel-gold festooning every branch, and hung 
with the hundred costly knicknacks the store- 
keepers invent year by year u to make trade/ ' 
until the tree itself disappears entirely under its 
burden, I have a feeling what a fraud has been 
practised on the kindly spirit of Yule. Wax 
candles are the only real thing for a Christmas 
tree, candles of wax that mingle their perfume 
with that of the burning fir, not the by-product 
of some coal-oil or other abomination. What if 
the boughs do catch fire; they can be watched, 
and too many candles are tawdry, anyhow. Also, 
red apples, oranges, and old-fashioned cornu- 
copias made of colored paper, and made at home, 
look a hundred times better and fitter in the 
green; and so do drums and toy trumpets and 
wald-horns, and a rocking-horse reined up in 
front that need not have cost forty dollars, or 
anything like it. 

I am thinking of one, or rather two, a little 
piebald earn with a wooden seat between, for 



98 THE OLD TOWN 

which Mother certainly did not give over seventy- 
five cents at the store, that as " Belcher and 
Mamie " — the names were bestowed on the 
beasts at sight by Kate, aged three, who bossed 
the play-room — gave a generation of romping 
children more happiness than all the expensive 
railroads and trolley-cars and steam-engines that 
are considered indispensable to keeping Christ- 
mas nowadays. And the Noah's Ark with 
Noah and his wife and all the animals that went 
two by two — ah, well ! I haven't set out to 
preach a sermon on extravagance that makes 
no one happier, but I wish — The legend makes 
me think of the holly that grew in our Danish 
woods. We called it Christ-thorn, for to us it 
was of that the crown of thorns was made with 
which the cruel soldiers mocked our Saviour, and 
the red berries were the drops of blood that fell 
from His anguished brow. Therefore the holly was 
a sacred tree, and to this day the woods in which I 
find it seem to me like the forest where the Christ- 
mas roses bloomed in the night when the Lord was 
born, different from all other woods, and Dette r. 



THE OLD TOWN 99 

Mistletoe was rare in Denmark. There was 
known to be but one oak in all the land on which 
it grew. But that did not discourage the young. 
We had our kissing games which gave the boys 
and girls their chance to choose sides, and in the 
Christmas season they went on right merrily. 
There was rarely a night that did not bring the 
children together under some roof or other. They 
say that kissing goes by favor, but we had not 
arrived at that point yet, though we had our 
preferences. In the game of Post Office, for 
instance, he was a bold boy who would dare call 
out the girl he really liked, to get the letter that 
was supposed to be awaiting her. You could tell 
for a dead certainty who was his choice by watch- 
ing whom he studiously avoided asking for. I 
have a very vivid recollection of having once 
really dared with sudden desperation, and of the 
defiant flushed face, framed in angry curls, that 
confronted me in the hall, the painful silence 
while we each stood looking the other way and 
heard our playmates tittering behind the closed 
door, — for well they knew, — and her indignant 



100 THE OLD TOWN 

stride as she went back to her seat unkissed, with 
me trailing behind, feeling like a very sheepish 
boy, and no doubt looking the part. 

The Old Year went out with much such a 
racket as we make nowadays, but of quite a 
different kind. We did not blow the New Year 
in, we " smashed" it in. When it was dark on 
New Year's Eve, we stole out with all the cracked 
and damaged crockery of the year that had been 
hoarded for the purpose and, hieing ourselves 
to some favorite neighbor's door, broke our pots 
against it. Then we ran, but not very far or 
very fast, for it was part of the game that if one 
was caught at it, he was to be taken in and treated 
to hot doughnuts. The smashing was a mark of 
favor, and the citizen who had most pots broken 
against his door was the most popular man in 
town. When I was in the Latin School, a cranky 
burgomaster, whose door had been freshly painted, 
gave orders to the watchmen to stop it and gave 
them an unhappy night, for they were hard put 
to it to find a way it was safe to look, with the 
streets full of the best citizens in town, and their 




We 'smashed' the New Year in." 



THE OLD TOWN 101 

wives and daughters, sneaking singly by with 
bulging coats on their way to salute a friend. 
That was when our mothers — those who were not 
out smashing in New Year — came out strong, after 
the fashion of mothers. They baked more dough- 
nuts than ever that night, and beckoned the 
watchman in to the treat; and there he sat, 
blissfully deaf while the street rang with the 
thunderous salvos of our raids; until it was dis- 
covered that the burgomaster himself was on 
patrol, when there was a sudden rush from kitchen 
doors and a great scurrying through streets that 
grew strangely silent. 

The town had its revenge, however. The 
burgomaster, returning home in the midnight 
hour, stumbled in his gate over a discarded Christ- 
mas tree hung full of old boots and many black 
and sooty pots that went down around him with 
great smash in the upset, so that his family 
came running out in alarm to find him sprawling 
in the midst of the biggest celebration of all. 
His dignity suffered a shock which he never got 
over quite. But it killed the New Year's fun, too. 



102 THE OLD TOWN 

For he was really a good fellow, and then he was 
the burgomaster, and chief of police to boot. I 
suspect the fact was that the pot smashing had 
run its course. Perhaps the supply of pots was 
giving out; we began to use tinware more about 
that time. That was the end of it, anyhow. 

We boys got square, too, with the watchmen. 
We knew their habit of stowing themselves away 
in the stage-coach that stood in the market-place 
when they had cried the hour at ten o'clock, and 
we caught them napping there one dark night 
when we were coming home from a party. The 
stage had doors that locked on the outside. We 
slammed them shut and ran the conveyance, 
with them in it wildly gesticulating from the 
windows, through the main street of the town, 
amid the cheers of the citizens whom the racket 
aroused from their slumbers. We were safe 
enough. The watchmen were not anxious to 
catch us, maddened as they were by our prank, 
and they were careful not to report us either. I 
chuckled at that exploit more than once when, 
in years long after, I went the rounds of the mid- 




- 

x 

-J 
P 

Q 



THE OLD TOWN 103 

night streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt, as they 
called New York's Police Commissioner, to find his 
patrolmen sleeping soundly on their posts when 
they should have been catching thieves. Human 
nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so dif- 
ferent, after all, in the old world and in the new. 
With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end. 
In that night, if a girl would know her fate, she 
must go to bed walking backward and throw a 
shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her 
pillow, I forget which, perhaps both, and say 
aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy Kings 
to show her the man 

Whose table I must set, 
Whose bed I must spread, 
Whose name I must bear, 
Whose bride I must be. 

The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to 
be her husband. There was no escape from it, 
and consequently she did not try. He was her 
Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for 
worse. Let us hope that the Nisse played her no 
scurvy trick, and that it was for better always. 



CHAPTER V 




Getting Ready for the Review. 



The stork came 
in April, with de- 
livery from the vile 
tyranny of March. 
Talk of March vio- 
lets ! to us the 
i ... K month meant cod- 
f|^ liver oil. It was our 
steady dessert all 
through it. Good 
for the system, they said. Perhaps it was. I 
think it encouraged duplicity. The rule was that 
when we had grown to like it so that we licked 
the spoon after it, we might quit. You wouldn't 
believe how quickly we came to adore it. How- 
ever, when our need was greatest, the stork came, 
and with it balmy spring and our freedom. Not 
necessarily all at once : three times the stork had 
to have snow in its nest to make things right; 
but we knew the sunshine was not far away. 
One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out 

104 







*' "" "" *> : 1 


1 




1 

. J 
1 


• jjBflUwKMm&' '" 






The stork came in April. 



THE OLD TOWN 



105 



a noisy "How d'do" through its long red bill, 
and then we children gathered below and sang 



our song of welcome : 

Allegro. 



I 



m 



d: 



■< — i- 



*=i 



Stork, Stork - ie long leg 



§!e: 



t^ 



Er -I —I r\ 1 



§tel 



Where were you this long while ? 

-9- 

■ 1 \= 



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106 THE OLD TOWN 

The swallow and the starling were not far be- 
hind it. They were all our tenants and lived 
under our roof, or on it, but the stork was the 
only one who paid rent formally. Payment was 
made in kind. Every other year he threw an egg 
out of the nest, and the next year a fledgling stork. 
For the rest he held aloof, disdaining haughtily 
to hold communication of any kind with us. 
Even when a disabled stork became, by force of 
circumstances, a member of the household, 
residing in the hen-house through the winter, he 
never grew familiar, but accepted what was given 
to him with quiet reserve as from a subject people ; 
which, of course, was his right, seeing that he was a 
public functionary of the first importance. We 
had no stork on our house, but both our neigh- 
bors did, and as if to make up for the apparent 
slight, he was a regular visitor in our family. 
They seemed to always know when he was coming, 
and when I was told of it, I never failed to leave 
a Tvebak for him in the window which the nurse 
had left open so that he should not wake up the 
whole house by rapping on the pane with his bill. 



THE OLD TOWN 107 

And when it was gone in the morning, I knew 
that a little brother had come to join our com- 
pany; and sure enough it was so. 

The swallow sang for us, and we saw to it that 
his way out and in of the hallway where he built 
his nest was free, by leaving a pane out of the 
transom. If by any chance that was obstructed, 
we knew it by his flying up and down before the 
doorway, waiting anxiously for some one to open 
it, that he might slip in where a string of little 
round heads, always set in a straight row, were 
clamoring with wide-open bills for flies and gnats. 
When the starling sang his evening song in the 
big poplar, the Old Town was white with the 
bloom of the elder. He left it dyed a deep purple, 
for he was as fond of elderberries as we were of 
the soup our mothers made of them, and the 
stain of them abides. In between the blossom- 
ing and the berrying when his youngsters were 
grown, he took himself off with his wife for sev- 
eral weeks, leaving only the children behind. To 
France, it was said, he went, and to Mediterranean 
olive groves, where they hunted him as a nuisance. 



108 THE OLD TOWN 

We loved him and gave him sanctuary. And he 
helped the farmer in turn by ridding his field of 
pests. Where a flock of starlings settled down 
for luncheon, no wriggling thing remained to tell 
the tale. 

By the time the stork was settled on the Rec- 
tor's house and busy repairing his nest, our boy- 
ish eyes turned speculatively toward the swelling 
buds of the pear tree that hung temptingly over 
the narrow way to the Latin School, and we 
tried to estimate how many of them had pears 
in them, and what were the chances of their 
happening to hit us as they fell, later on. Our 
daily walk took the direction of the Castle Hill, 
and turned off at the big buckthorn hedge to 
the river where we swam in summer. The cow- 
slips were in the meadows then, and forget-me- 
nots grew on the bank where the rushes nodded to 
the waters going out to the sea, as if they would 
like to go too, but, being unable, gave them a mes- 
sage of cheer and good luck on the way. And the 
spring birds called to each other in the meadows. 
Then the bright nights were at hand. They 



THE OLD TOWN 109 

came, as night does in the hot countries, sud- 
denly. You saw in the almanac — the 6th of 
May, I think it was — that they were due, and 
that night, or the next if it was clear, you noticed 
a something in the atmosphere that was different. 
You walked with a lighter step, and your glance 
strayed constantly to the west, where the light 
never quite went out, but kept moving round 
north, to hail the coming day in the east. And 
every morning it came earlier and left later, till 
St. John's Day was passed, when the days 
again began to grow shorter. Then one night in 
early August, when we walked abroad on the 
causeway, we knew that the summer was soon 
over. The light had gone out of the sky, as sud- 
denly as it came, and the world was changed. 

There lives in my memory such an evening in 
after years. I had been home — for ever the 
Old Town remained home to one whose cradle 
was rocked there — and was going my farewell 
rounds among the old people and the old places 
before packing off with the stork and his family. 
My way took me past the Castle Hill in the early 



110 THE OLD TOWN 

twilight. A man stood up there, a lonely figure 
sharply outlined against the light that was fading 
out of the western sky. He stood watching it as 
if he would hold it fast if he could, never stirring 
once while the warm pink changed to a steely 
gray, cold as the moonlight on Arctic ice. Be- 
hind him the town lay buried in its shadows. I 
almost fancied I saw him shiver as they crept up 
the hill to close him in their long night. I knew 
him, a schoolmate of mine, a man in good posi- 
tion who had remained unmarried and was now 
past middle age, always a lonesome sort of fel- 
low. He stood there yet when the houses shut 
him out of my sight, and I did not see him again. 
Three days later, on the day we sailed from 
Copenhagen, I heard that he was dead. He had 
killed himself, no one knew why. He was com- 
fortable as the world goes, and there was no 
explanation of his act, they said. To me none 
was needed. The picture of him standing there 
alone, the twilight of summer and of life closing 
in upon him, rose up before me, and I thought I 
understood. 



THE OLD TOWN 111 

With the coming of the bright nights the Old 
Town grew young again. Its staid habits were 
laid aside ; the watchmen cried the bedtime hour 
in vain. At all hours of the night, till the mid- 
night bell sounded and sometimes later, young and 
old were abroad, on the causeway, in the Plant- 
age, or driving to the shore and taking their 
supper there. The young rowed and sang on the 
river in the long glowing twilight and had a good 
time. School and university were closed, and 
the students came back to visit old friends and 
to make love. With midsummer came " Holme 
week," of which more hereafter, when they all 
went out and sported in the hay together. An 
endless procession of young couples have driven 
home on the hay wagons, watching the midnight 
glow in the northern heavens from the top of the 
load, hand in hand, and thinking earth a new- 
found paradise for Two, while Cupid laughed at 
the ferry-landing to see them go. In Holme week 
he was always a regular boarder with the ferry- 
master. But the young never suspected it, or if 
they did, showed no fear; and their elders, who 



112 THE OLD TOWN 

knew, having met him there in their time, held 
their peace. I am not sure that they did not 
even surreptitiously pay his board. For they 
were sly, the good people of the Old Town. 

Early in August the young storks began to 
gather on the high roof of the Cloister church, and 
every day we saw them manoeuvring there in 
agitated rows, between practice flights into the 
fields that grew longer and longer toward the 
time for their departure. At the final review, 
we knew, any of them that could not fly well 
enough and far enough would be killed by the 
rest, for no laggards were wanted on their long 
trip to King Pharaoh's land. We watched them 
soaring high, high up, and hoped fervently that 
our own stork, or the neighbor's we knew so well, 
might pass muster and not be stabbed to death 
with those long bills which we had seen carrying 
home snakes and frogs and lizards to the nest so 
often, and always raised in loud thanksgiving as 
the feast was spread before the brood. Then they 
seemed the gentlest of birds; but all at once the 
red beaks became swords to our imagination, to 



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A Girl from the North Sea Islands. 



THE OLD TOWN 113 

pierce the helpless youngster who got a bad re- 
port at his " exam." Every day we looked to see 
if they were all there and were glad when none 
was missing. Then one morning we looked out, 
and the Cloister roof was bare. The storks were 
gone. Every nest in the town was empty. We 
searched awhile, incredulous; then, with a little 
shiver, went to look up our skates and our 
mittens. 

Before we had use for them, however, came the 
annual fair in September. The Ribe Fair was fa- 
mous throughout the middle ages, when the town 
was the chief seaport of the country. Then mer- 
chants came from far and near, and the court 
bought its purple and fine linen of them. In our 
day it had dwindled, as had the Old Town itself, 
until barely a baker's dozen of traders from abroad 
brought their wares. But the Ribe merchants 
built their booths in the Square, and there came 
embroideries from Schleswig, pottery from the 
country to the north — the black " Jute pots," 
that alone were deemed fit to cook in by a careful 
housewife. The woman who served fried eels, 



114 THE OLD TOWN 

and coffee out of a copper kettle with rock sugar 
in lumps, — lovely lumps, strung on a thread, can 
I ever forget ! — sat at the Cat-head Door of the 
Domkirke. To us she was as much of an institu- 
tion as the Domkirke itself and twice as impor- 
tant, for she came only once a year, while the 
church was there all the time. In the narrow 
lane between the booths multitudes of farm-folk 
swarmed, togged out in their best, admiring it all 
and meeting friends at every step. The blue of 
the border gendarmes and the red and green of 
the Fano girls made a pretty picture. The Fair 
was in fact the great opportunity of the country 
folk for social intercourse in the days when news- 
papers were rare, railroad and telegraph as yet 
to come, and a letter an event news of which 
spread through a country neighborhood and was 
discussed at its firesides in all its probable bear- 
ings. The peasants came to the Fair, the men 
to dicker and trade, if nothing else their pipes, 
it being understood that a treat went with the 
trade, so that they became speedily mellow and 
sometimes loud over the tavern board. The 



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" There were booths with toys and booths with trumpets. 



THE OLD TOWN 115 

women laid in their supply of ribbons, calico, and 
such like for the year, heard and discussed the 
news of weddings, christenings, and funerals ; and 
the foundation of many a match was laid with a 
parting invitation to the prospective suitor to 
"come and see the farm" as the next step in the 
negotiations. 

To us children it was all an enchanted land. 
There were booths with toys and booths with 
trumpets and booths with great " honey-cakes " 
with an almond heart right in the middle. No 
such cakes are made nowadays, and the trumpets 
in the toy-shops send forth no such blasts of rap- 
ture as did those we bought at the Fair in the Old 
Town and blew till our cheeks bulged and our 
eyes stared with the strain. Up and down we 
trooped, through lane after lane, dragging weary 
but happy mothers in our wake, trumpeting — I 
can hear those peals across all the toilsome years. 
Tin horns — bah ! Those were trumpets, I tell you, 
red and green and silver-shine. And at last we 
brought up in front of the Great Panorama and 
stopped, breathless, to look and listen. 



116 



THE OLD TOWN 



The panorama man kept no booth. He was 
above it. His entire outfit consisted of a sheet of 
canvas hung upon a pole and painted all over with 
the scenes he sang about. For he was a singer, 
the nineteenth-century descendant of the Skjald 
of our forefathers ; far descended, alas ! his song 
was ever about murder and horror on sea and 
land. He was the real precursor of the yellow 
press — pictures, songs, and all. Whether he made 
the latter up himself, or merely sang the ballad 
of the day, I do not know. If it was not about a 
man who took his girl to a dance and, getting her 
aside, 



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world horror, the full circumstances of which 



THE OLD TOWN 



117 



were set forth in lurid words, and even more 
lurid paint, on the canvas. Thus, for instance, 
the burning of the emigrant steamer Austria in 
mid-ocean. I can see him now, slapping the 
canvas with his rattan, and hear every inflection 
of his strident voice as he drew attention to the 
picture of it steaming peacefully along, and sang : 

Andante. 



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THE OLD TOWN 



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Then the fire and the horror, the women throwing 
the children overboard and being swallowed up 
by yellow and crimson flames that sent grewsome 
thrills up and down our backbones — and then 
the hat passed around for the troubadour. His 
was the piece de resistance of the Fair, and we 
went home, when we had heard him through, 
impressed that we had heard the heart of the 
great world throb. 

Besides the Fair which in olden times was known 
as Our Lady's Fair, perhaps because of the Dom- 
kirke, 1 in the shadow of which it was held, more 
likely because it came on the Virgin's feast-day, 
there were two other kinds,, the cattle fairs and 
1 The Church of Our Lady was its official title. 




The Girl Market. 



THE OLD TOWN 119 

the " girl-market." The last was in the spring 
and fall, when farmers hired their help. Those 
who were for hire then came to the Old Town on 
a set date, and stood in two long rows in front of 
the old tavern in the Square, which remained 
unchanged, as did the custom no doubt, from the 
Sixteenth Century. The women bared their arms 
to the shoulder, and the farmers felt them, 
approvingly or not as they thought them strong 
to do their work. There are tricks in all trades. 
An old country parson from one of the neighboring 
villages tells that a mistress at whose house hard 
scrabble ruled would sometimes be found to smear 
her mouth with bacon to give the impression that 
there was fat living where she was at home. 
When a pair were suited, the dickering began, 
and the bargain made had the sanction of law. 
Indeed, the applicant's "book" was the first thing 
asked for if the physical inspection had been sat- 
isfactory. In it his or her character was recorded 
by successive employers, and attested by the 
police, to whom it had to be presented each time 
the owner of it made a change of base. 



120 THE OLD TOWN 

All through the spring great droves of steers 
came through the town on their way to the 
Holstein marshlands, where they were to be 
fattened for the Hamburg and London trade. 
Ribe was on one of the ancient cattle tracks 
from the north to the great southern pastures. 
Then we heard the tread of many hurrying hoofs 
at early dawn and the loud hop-how ! of the herd- 
ers trying to keep their droves together. While 
they passed through the town, the people kept 
discreetly indoors. Indeed, there was no room 
for them outside ; but they bore it patiently, 
being used to it. Often enough the cows that 
lived in the town went in by the same door their 
owners used, and naturally there came to be a 
neighborly feeling between them, which was 
extended to these wayfarers. Sometimes, in- 
stead of cattle, flocks of Jutland horses came 
through with braided manes and tails, headed 
south for the armies of Prussia or France or 
Austria. Twice a year, I think, they halted at 
the Old Town, and the market square became 
the scene of a great cattle fair. It was on one of 



THE OLD TOWN 



121 



these occasions that I made my first bid for a 
horse. I must have been seven or eight years old, 
and had with much argument brought my mother 
over to my notion that a little horse was a good 
thing to have about the house. It could be 
stabled in the peat shed, where we kept our winter 




Where the Cows go in through the Street Door. 

fuel, and in summer grass enough to more than 
keep it grew between the cobble-stones in our 
street, and on the narrow sidewalk. So it was 
decided that I might buy a horse at the next fair, 
if I could get it for eight skilling, — about five 
cents, I should say. That was the appropriation, 
and with it I sped, my heart beating fast, to the 



122 THE OLD TOWN 

Square and interviewed a dealer, telling him that 
I only wanted a little horse, being but a little 
boy ; and besides, the peat shed was small. I had 
seen some that were just the kind I wanted, run- 
ning along with a farmer's team sometimes. 

The dealer heard me through very gravely, and 
as gravely inspected the eight skilling which I 
unwrapped and showed him as a guarantee of 
good faith. He ran his eye over his sleek mares 
and regretted that those little horses were scarce 
that year, and just then he had none in stock. 
But he was going south, where they were plenti- 
ful, he said, and if I would save my money till 
he came back, he would be sure to bring me one. 
And I went home joyfully to report my success 
and get the shed ready, and also to drive off the 
weeding women, who came most inappropriately 
that very spring to dig out the dandelions in 
our gutter. They were to be kept as a choice 
morsel for my horse. I waited anxiously all 
through that summer and kept a lookout for 
every drove of horses that came through, but my 
trader I never saw again, and in none of the herds 



THE OLD TOWN 123 

was my little horse. After a while I forgot about 
it in the great overwhelming sensation of the 
time. The King came to the town. 

In its old age that was an honor it had rarely 
enjoyed. No one there had, I think, seen the 
King, unless in the field as a soldier seven years 
before, in ? 49-'50. King Frederik, furthermore, 
was a great favorite of the people. He had given 
them constitutional government, and he was the 
popular hero whose army had driven the in- 
vaders back after two years of hard fighting. 
So we turned out to receive him, to the last in- 
habitant. He came, impressive, kingly, yet with 
a bonhomie about him that made the common 
people accept him as their own wherever he went. 
They told of how he had fared with a steady 
Jutland farmer who entertained him and his 
suite on the journey across country. Those yeo- 
men still said "thou" to the King, as their fore- 
fathers did in the long ago, and knew little of the 
ways of courts — cared less, I fancy. Also, they 
are as close-fisted as they are square in a trade 
with " known man." A neighbor is safe in their 



124 THE OLD TOWN 

hands; others may look out for themselves. So 
when the King went to his host and thanked him 
for his trouble, calling him by his first name as 
was his wont, for he understood his men, Hans 
scratched his head. 

"It's all right with the trouble, King," he 
answered; "but about the expense. That's 
worse." 

The King laughed long and loud and squared 
up, and they parted friends. 

This was the man we turned out in a body to 
honor. The men who had horses and could ride 
received him as an escort, miles up the road. 
All the countryside was there to see and to cheer ; 
most of the men had carried muskets in the war, 
and to the tune of "Den tappre Landsoldat " 
they brought him in. The streets were hung 
with garlands of green, and little girls in white 
strewed flowers before the royal procession. I 
remember it all as if it were yesterday. In the 
evening there was a great time in the Domkirke. 
The King sat inside the altar-rail in his blue 
soldier's uniform and with a big silver helmet on. 



THE OLD TOWN 125 

Years and years after, going through the National 
Museum at Copenhagen, I saw it hanging there in 
a glass case, and clear across the room I knew it 
at sight. That was the way a king ought to 
look, and it was the way King Christian, his 
successor, did look when I saw him in the same 
seat nearly fifty years later. Only he was slen- 
der and youthful of figure despite his eighty 
odd years. King Frederik was stout. Stout 
or slender, he was our boyish ideal of a 
king. 

There was the gala dinner to which our father 
and mother went and came home in the small 
hours of the morning with their pockets full of 
bonbons, and with wondrous tales of the show 
that made our ears tingle all that winter. And 
then there was the discovery on the Castle Hill, 
made for the occasion expressly. That was the 
very peak and pinnacle of it all. 

Ever since anybody could remember there had 
been stories about a secret passage leading from 
the Castle Hill under the moat into town — now, 
it was said, to the Bishop's Manse, and then again 



126 THE OLD TOWN 

to the Cloister, or to the Domkirke itself. It 
was supposed to be a way they had in the old 
fighting days of getting out and taking the enemy 
in the rear, when the castle was besieged and they 
were hard put to it. No one ever knew the 
truth of it, and so we all believed it; but now 
by some fortunate chance the secret passage 
was actually found. The mouth of it had been 
uncovered, and the King was to see it. It was a 
tunnel built of the big brick the monks made, 
and which we still knew as monk-brick. Half 
the Old Town is built of it, that is to say, castle, 
cloisters, and churches long since gone live again 
in the walls of the houses built since the Reforma- 
tion. What is quite evidently a part of the 
mantelpiece from the castle adorns the entrance 
to the silversmith's on the corner of the street 
through which King Valdemar rode to his dying 
queen, and the searcher of to-day, seeking vainly 
a trace of his famous castle where it stood, walks 
over it, unthinking, when he goes in to buy a 
souvenir of his visit. This secret way stirred 
the town mightily. It was confirmation of the 



THE OLD TOWN 127 

old rumors, and it was in itself a mystery. Where 
was the other end of the hole ? 

The King saw, but declined the honor of being 
the explorer. He suggested first one then another 
of his suite w T ith less avoirdupois. But they all 
had excuses. In fact, a small boy might barely 
have done it; further, the hole led downward 
and was black and ill-smelling. So it remained 
unexplored. It stood open for some time, an 
object of awe and many speculative creeps to us 
boys; then it was covered up. I regret to have 
to add, as destroying a long-cherished illusion 
that had a glamour about it which it is hateful 
to dispel, that when diggings were made in the 
Castle Hill last summer, under competent leader- 
ship, our secret passage was discovered to be an 
old sewer that led no farther than the dry moat. 
It was just as well none of the King's courtiers 
went down. 

Those close-fisted farmer neighbors of ours 
were sometimes very well-to-do ; but a hard fight 
with a lean soil had taught them the value of 
money earned, perhaps overmuch. In the Old 



128 THE OLD TOWN 

Town, as I have said, there were no very rich peo- 
ple, but the poor were not poor either in the sense 
in which one thinks of poverty in a great city. 
They had always enough to eat and were com- 
fortably housed. There were no beggars, unless 
you would count as such the travelling ' ' Burschen, ' ' 
mechanics making the rounds of Denmark and 
Germany under their guild plan, working where 
they could and asking alms when they had noth- 
ing, the which we freely gave. It was an under- 
stood thing that that was not charity in any 
sense, but a kind of lift to a traveller on his way. 
So he was getting experience in his work, what- 
ever it might be, by seeing the ways of other 
communities, and by and by would return to his 
own, better regarded as man and mechanic for 
having " travelled" in his years. It was, of 
course, the old mediaeval system of which we saw 
the last. There is very little left of it to-day, I 
imagine. 

I said that there were no beggars in the Old 
Town. There are indeed few in Denmark, where 
prosperity is very evenly distributed. It was, 



THE OLD TOWN 129 

nevertheless, there I encountered the slyest little 
beggar it was ever my fortune to come across. 
It was in one of the cemeteries of Copenhagen, 
where we had been to look up a friend's grave, 
that we came upon a little girl, a child of ten, who 
was fashioning a little mound in the dust and 
putting a monument over it, a piece of a broken 
slate. She looked up as we stopped beside her, 
noticing our serious faces and no doubt check- 
ing us off at once as being there on business, not 
mere chance visitors. 

"Here lies my cat," she said. "It was red." 
"Oh!" We were interested at once. "And 
what did it die of?" 

"The weasel killed it — sucked its blood." 
We walked right into the trap — "And is there 
to be a writing?" 

"Yes," sadly; "<Good-by, little Svip;' but I 
have no money to buy a slate pencil with." 

She accepted our penny with the gravity of an 
undertaker as she cast a swift glance down the 
walk where two women in deep mourning were 
coming. Then she went on making her grave. 



130 



THE OLD TOWN 



There came a season in the autumn when the 
Old Town resounded with the squealing of count- 
less pigs. It 



was killing- 
time when the 
fat friend so 
fondly cher- 
ished through- 
out the year 
was to make 
return by fur- 
nishing forth 
the tables of 
his hosts. We 
boys heard it 
with joy, for 
we knew what 
was to come 
after all the 
woe. Toward 
evening of the 
. great day 
trenchers of 




"Trenchers of steaming sausage." 



THE OLD TOWN 131 

steaming sausage were carried around among the 
neighbors who had no pigs, that they also might 
taste of the good things of the earth. Blood 
sausage was there, big and round and red, and 
good to eat, fried with syrup ; and liver sausage, 
pale but appealing; and sausage with rice in and 
sausage with spices in; and roll sausage, which 
sometimes I buy in delicatessen shops nowadays; 
but they must have lost the art of making them, 
for they don't taste as they did then. The 
trencher must have been welcome in Mother's 
larder, for with so many mouths to fill we were 
taught to look upon meat as a relish rather than 
the mainstay of the meal. Not that we did not 
have enough. We always had that, but dishes 
made of flour, of potatoes, of peas and other 
vegetables, played a greater role in the economic 
cookery of the day and country than nowadays. 
And we liked it. I defy any one to find a summer 
dish that compares with " Rodgrod med Mode," 
which was just currant juice and corn-starch 
with cream. Even the Saturday menu in our 
house was a favorite : fried herring and Ollebrod. 



132 THE OLD TOWN 

For special occasions the herring were fried "in 
dressing-gowns," each in a cornucopia of white 
paper that gave the dish quite a festive touch. 
Ollebrod is a dish I despair of making the Ameri- 
can mind grasp. It was made of black bread 
boiled in beer till it made a thick broth, to which 
each one added cream and sugar to suit his taste. 
Boiled beer sounds funny, but it was the house- 
hold beer, non-alcoholic, which was both cheap 
and good. The other kind we knew as Bavarian 
beer. Its use was not so common as it has be- 
come since. 

Still, the Old Town had ever been partial to its 
beer. When it was in its prime, eight "beer- 
tasters" were among the town functionaries. 
They were to see that the supply was up to the 
standard, with the proper allowance of good hops. 
In the account of the hanging of the big bell in 
the church tower — the "storm bell" I spoke of — 
in 1599, two barrels of beer to the men who hoisted 
it up and hung it are set down among the expenses. 
One wonders whether all who took a hand were 
included. According to one report of that day's 



THE OLD TOWN 133 

proceedings, there was some doubt about their 
ability to transport the bell from the foundry to 
the Domkirke, until the Rector of the Latin School 
put it up to his boys, who at once took hold and 
dragged it all the way alone. Whether they came 
in under the subsequent largesse of beer is not 
stated, but probably not. Two barrels would 
not have gone very far then. All this seems queer 
to us nowadays. It is strange to find that in 
that century the privileged Town Hall dramshop 
— the Rathhaus-keller, in fact — achieved a 
competitor in the Domkirke itself. The chapter 
of clerics opened one of their own in their cellar 
under the north end of the chancel, on the plea 
that they must have wine for churchly functions, 
of a proper quality, and kept it going for I don't 
know how long. Much later than that, in 1683, 
clergymen were forbidden by law to distil whiskey, 
but in 1768 "priest and deacon" were expressly 
confirmed in their right to distil it for their own 
use. So there was ecclesiastical sanction, and 
to spare, for all the beer and spirits that were 
consumed. Clear down to my time, when the 



134 THE OLD TOWN 

Jutland peasant brewed/ it was the custom to 
throw the first three handfuls of malt into the 
mash "in the name of the Father, the Son, and 
the Holy Ghost." And the same man who did 
that, as the next step shut all the doors of the 
brewing room, placed a glowing coal on each 
doorstep, put three coals in the vat with a wisp 
of straw bound in form of a cross, and finally 
stirred it all with the iron tongs from the fire- 
place, to keep evil eyes from spoiling the brew ! 2 

1 My father's friend, Pastor Fejlberg, who, as a village par- 
son just outside the Old Town, lived the life of the country folk 
and recorded it with sympathetic understanding, is my author- 
ity. I remember him telling a story which only last winter 
one of his old " boys " recalled to me in California. It was of 
the village tailor, who, coming home in the small hours of the 
morning, the worse for many deep potations of the strong mead 
at the inn, was beset by a ghost that would not let him go. 
In vain did he try to shake it off at cross-road after cross-road. 
They all ran like this X, and had no power over the children 
of darkness. The spectre still pursued him, shrieking in 
ghoulish glee over his failure. Not until he came to two roads 
that crossed at right angles, forming a true -f- , did he beat it 
off. There it could not pass, and he got home safe; let us 
hope, sobered also. 

2 Which reminds me of a lesson in manners I once received 
from the gudewife of a neighboring farm. It was in the days 



THE OLD TOWN 135 

No wonder there were spooks in the Old Town, 
the werwolf that haunted the graveyard by night, 
and the hell-horse on its three legs. 

Whenever I think of that last and the horror 
we held it in, it comes to me that our dread of 
crawling things must be largely a matter of legs, 
due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two 
or four. The hell-horse was ever so much more 
horrible because of its limping about by night 
on three. We hate a spider, which has six or 
eight, and loathe the thousand-leg worm with 
cause. And at the other end, when it comes to the 
snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by 
an instant impulse to kill it. It is not a religious 
prejudice at all, no Garden of Eden notion, but an 
instinctive recoil from the thing that does not 
conform to the established standard in legs. 

when the farmer and his hands all ate out of the same dish, 
each with his own horn spoon, which he afterward licked clean 
and stuck up under the beam until the next meal. I had 
never been away from home and had " notions " that made 
me decline a mellemmad (sandwich) when she brought it to 
me in her honest hand. She took in the situation, and after 
serving the other children, handed me my mellemmad with 
the fire-tongs, all sooty from the chimney. 



136 THE OLD TOWN 

But whether that be so or not, the hell-horse that 
so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was 
literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even 
the Old Town knows him no more, I guess. 

The man with his head under his arm was, if 
anything, worse than the hell-horse, and had an 
unpleasant habit of making himself at home under 
your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed 
outside. There was a headless man in the old 
mansion at Sonderskov, where I sometimes spent 
my summer vacation. You could hear him walk 
in the midnight hour up and down, up and down 
the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for 
fear he would come to our door and knock. I 
have heard him more than once since I grew up 
and identified his tread on the oaken stairs with 
the regular beat of the tower-clock above my 
head, but still I confess to a creepy feeling 
when I hear it. 

But I have gone far afield from the household 
economics of the Old Town. They were intended 
to make both ends meet on a scale of small in- 
comes with need, often enough, of the closest 



THE OLD TOWN 137 

figuring. Large families were the rule rather 
than the exception. Not till my father was long 
in his grave and I was looking over his old papers 
and accounts, did I suspect how bitter was the 
fight he waged those forty years and to what 
straits he was put. To turn a coat when the 
right side was worn threadbare was a common 
expedient in those days of honest cloth, but 
Father had his overcoat turned twice to tide him 
over an evil time. As for us boys, we didn't have 
any half the time. I remember the winter when, 
being in such case and making a virtue of bald 
necessity, I tried to organize a Spartan Society 
among my schoolmates, the corner-stone of which 
was contempt of overcoats as plain mollycoddling. 
As a means of attracting the boys there were 
secret passwords and an initiation that had to be 
worked at dusk in the moat by the Castle Hill and 
was supposed to be very grewsome. It took 
for a while, until the mothers put a stop to it. 
I believe one of them who had read iEsop's 
fable about the fox that had lost its tail and tried 
to persuade the other foxes that it was the latest 



138 THE OLD TOWN 

fashion, saw through my dodge. At any rate 
the long woollen muffler which the society al- 
lowed, I being possessed of one, went out of vogue 
and the overcoats came back. It must have 
been at that time that my father bought at a 
salvage sale of the cargo of a wrecked ship a roll 
of really fine cloth of a peculiar sea-green color. 
It was a good investment, for it made not only 
a suit for Father that had lots of wear in it, but 
all the family were clad in green while it lasted, 
which was a long while. I hate to think what 
the boys of to-day would have nicknamed us. 
They were not so bright then, and I doubt if we 
would have cared. We boys were quite able to 
defend the family honor, and quite ready too. 
Father had a fancy for numbering his children 
in Latin. The sixth was called Sextus, the 
ninth Nonus. In grim jest, he proposed to name 
the twelfth Duodecimus, but agreed with his 
fellow-teachers that the luckless child would be 
forever miscalled " dozen. " They had a good 
laugh over it. Father was very far from being a 
book-worm. Though he was very learned, he 



THE OLD TOWN 139 

had a keen sense of humor, and, for all the heavy 
burdens he carried, he was the life of the com- 
pany always. 

The dead languages were his task in the Latin 
School, the living his pleasure and recreation. I 
doubt if there was any modern tongue in which 
he was not more or less proficient. And so it 
was natural that when a wrecked ship's crew 
came to the Old Town he should be the interpre- 
ter; or when, as happened every now and then, 
a bottle was cast ashore on one of the islands with 
a message from some ship in peril on the deep, 
that it should be brought to him to be deciphered. 
There was a fixed fee for this, — a "specie," which 
was two daler in the case of a bottle, — and it 
was most welcome. Yet there was always an 
element of the deeply tragic in it. We children 
stood with bated breath and looked on while 
Father unfolded the piece of crumpled paper, 
polished his spectacles, and read with husky voice 
some such message as this : 

" We are sinking. Jesus, Maria, save us ! " 
Then the name of the vessel, its home port, 



140 THE OLD TOWN 

and the latitude, if they knew it. I think I am 
quoting literally one which I have never forgot- 
ten. It was a Portuguese vessel and it got some- 
how mixed up in my childish imagination with 
the Lisbon earthquake. That had happened a long 
while before, but news lasted longer than nowa- 
days. There was not a fresh horror every day, 
and the illustrated papers kept the earthquake 
in stock until the siege of Sebastopol came and 
gave us all a change. That in its turn lasted, I 
think, quite a dozen years, down to our own war 
of '64. 

I cannot stop without recording here the great 
and awful tragedy of my childhood. It was 
when I had become possessed, by some unheard- 
of streak of luck, of a silver four-skilling that 
was all my own, to spend as I pleased, with no 
string to it. It was a grave responsibility, for 
I perceived that with this immeasurable wealth I 
might buy practically anything, and what it 
was to be, with the shops of the Old Town simply 
crammed with things that were all desirable, 
was not to be decided lightly. So I betook 



THE OLD TOWN 



141 



myself to the Long Bridge, where I could be 
alone, to think it over, my pockets, in the depths 
of which reposed the miraculous coin, filled with 




"1 THREW THE LAST PEBBLE." 



pebbles to punctuate my ideas withal. I stood 
on one of the arches and threw them in, watching 
the rings they made in the water, and as they 
widened till they reached from shore to shore 



142 THE OLD TOWN 

and I dug deeper and deeper into my pocket, my 
ambition and my hopes rose with them. Until, 
all unknowing, I threw the last pebble and, as it 
sped forth in the sunshine, saw that it was my 
four-skilling. The waters closed over it with a 
little splash I can hear yet, and I saw its silver 
sheen as it turned and sank. I did not weep. 
The disaster was too great. I stood awhile dumb, 
then went home and told no one. Darkness had 
settled upon my life with a sorrow so great that I 
felt it invested even with a kind of dignity as a 
vast and irreparable misfortune. I cannot even 
now laugh at it. It was too terrible to ever quite 
forget. 



CHAPTER VI 




The Old Town 

was set in a 

meadow, grass to 

Vfe the right of it, 



~ grass to the left 
of it, stretching 
away toward the 

King Hakald's Stone. horizon Until in 

the south and east it came up against the black 
moor, and toward the sunset a little way met the 
sands of the western sea. What sport was there 
for boys in such a country ? My own boys asked 
me that question with something of impatience on 
a walk through the fields, for they had been sizing 
up the lads of their own age on baseball and found 
them no good. They threw the ball "just like 
girls." Not many days after one of them came 
home with a bruised nose and an increased respect 

143 



144 THE OLD TOWN 

for Danish muscle. It was good for fighting, 
anyhow. But ; in truth, we did not run to 
baseball when I was a boy; and as for fight- 
ing, we had no more than was good for us; 
when any Uitlander bragged, for instance. As 
I look back now it seems to me we didn't 
have time for either, so busy were we with our 
sports. 

There was the brook that led to the old manse, 
hidden quite behind a wind-tossed thicket of 
scrub-oak that had run over the sunken walls 
since the days when bishops were fighting men 
who went clad in iron to the wars. Then the 
manse was one of the strongholds of the Ribe 
prelates who led the armies of the King against 
the German counts, notably the " Strong Master 
Jacob," whose fists and sword saved many a soul 
where preaching failed. The brook was now 
barely a step wide, and we boys could easily jump 
over it in places; but the wild birds built their 
nests in its banks in spring, and up where we had 
our early bonfires it widened into a dark still pool, 
hedged in with mint and forget-me-nots, where 



THE OLD TOWN 145 

wary trout were always darting from the deep 
shadows. I go to seek that pool first thing when 
I return to the Old Town now, and it is not 
changed. But the boys of to-day seem to have 
forgotten it. 

And then the creek that meandered through the 
meadows miles and miles from the great peat bog 
where our winter fuel came from ; making one turn 
more tortuous than another, with hole after hole 
in the deep pockets that were fairly alive with 
yellow perch and their silver-scaled neighbors, 
whatever you would call them. We called them 
"skaller." I could go to a dozen of them blind- 
folded, I think, even now, and bait my hook and 
throw it in the exact spot where a perch is waiting 
to pull the cork under with one quick, determined 
jerk. No nibbling about him ; his mind is always 
made up and ready. Sometimes in my dreams I 
sit by the creek in one particular spot I have 
never forgotten, with feet hanging over the edge, 
the slanting sunlight on the dark waters, red- 
finned perch and silver fish darting hither and 
thither, and the soft west wind in the grass ; and 



146 



THE OLD TOWN 



then I am perfectly happy. Our ambition did 
not rise to five-pound pickerel in those days. 
Maybe there weren't any. My little boy and I 
found plenty in after years, and little else. My 
pretty fish seemed to be gone. Perhaps the 




"In my dreams I sit by the creek." 

pickerel had eaten them up, like some mean trust 
on dry land. If he had, we got square with him. 
We ate him in turn. They had reduced the catch- 
ing of him to an exact science. Drop your bait 
there, right in the edge of the rushes, so — a 
swirl and a sudden tightening of the line ! Let 
him run, and take out your watch. Eight min- 
utes to a dot, and he is off again. That is when 
he turns the bait around in his mouth and swal- 
lows it, having lain by waiting for signs of treach- 
ery. Now, pull him in. Here he is ! Hi, what a 
big fellow ! 




Where I shot my First Duck. 



THE OLD TOWN 147 

It was up here by this turn that I shot my first 
duck. It was in the winter vacation, and I had 
found out that here, where there was a stretch of 
open water, a flock of black-headed ducks were at 
home. I burrowed through six feet of snow to 
the water's edge and shot one of them as they flew. 
It fell and dived, and I threw my clothes in the 
snow and jumped after. Ugh ! it was cold. I 
dodged the floating ice as well as I could and kept 
turning the cakes over and over, looking for my 
duck, but it was not there. It was not till I 
climbed ashore again and dressed myself with 
chattering teeth that, happening to look under the 
bank where the current had cut the earth away, I 
saw it sitting composedly on the little shelving 
beach below. I can feel now the throbbing of my 
heart as I leaned over, and reaching down with 
infinite stealth, caught it by the neck and yanked 
it up. The pride of that homeward procession 
with the head of the duck flapping from my game- 
bag ! And then, after all, the cook had to wring 
its neck. In my joy I had forgotten to kill it. 
The shot had only stunned it. 



148 THE OLD TOWN 

If fish ran low in our own river because of the 
swans taking more than their share, we could go 
to Konge-aaen (the King's River), four or five 
miles away, where there were jumping fish which 
an Englishman came across the North Sea every 
year to catch with flies. This to us was a very 
amazing thing, and quite like an Englishman: 
to angle with a bit of hen feather, or even a grass- 
hopper, when there were fine fat worms to be had 
for the digging. Really, if the truth be told, it 
was a rank imposition on the fish. I confess that 
it seems to me so even yet — not exactly a square 
deal. The Englishman did not discourage this 
attitude on our part. He went right on, and for 
years had a monopoly of the salmon in the stream. 
For we did them little damage. Once in a while 
very large salmon were speared by those living 
along the stream. More frequently a farmer 
haying in his field spitted a sturgeon on his pitch- 
fork. Then there was a fight, the accounts of 
which we boys listened to with breathless interest 
when the fish was brought to town. Always it 
seemed to me to hark back to the days we so loved 



THE OLD TOWN 149 

to dream of ; for the sturgeon was all clad in mail, 
as it were, just like the knights of old, and it was 
often a question whether the fish would come 
ashore or the man go into the brook. At least 
that was the way he told it. If the fish said 
nothing, it looked grim enough to make you be- 
lieve almost anything. 

But if one did not run to fishing, — though what 
healthy boy does not ? — there was the heath, 
and then the forest. Forest sounds big. All there 
was of it was a patch of woodland some twenty 
or twenty-five acres in extent, but to us in the 
mellow autumn days it was an enchanted forest 
indeed. For under the gnarled oaks, only sur- 
vivors of the sturdy giants that had once covered 
the land, as the names of half the villages bore 
witness, and had filled the seas with the bold 
vikings' ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes 
that was the special preserve of the Latin School 
boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we had 
" month's leave." Month's leave was an after- 
noon off, which the school might choose itself 
once a month, if it had been good. Then a com- 



150 THE OLD TOWN 

mittee of the oldest boys went to the Rector with 
the observation that it was a fine day for play, 
while the rest of us stood with beating hearts, 
and if the gout did not pinch him just then, he 
would say, "Yes! be off," and with a mighty 
shout we would run for our botany boxes and 
crooked sticks, and for the woods, if it was in 
autumn. The boxes were to hold the nuts; the 
crooked sticks served a double purpose. They 
were for walking-staffs on the homeward way, 
for the forest was three miles away; once there, 
they were indispensable to hook down the branches 
with. The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of 
the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and 
were mostly big enough to climb, but the nuts 
were on the farthest twigs, that could only be 
reached and stripped by pulling them down. 
That was fine fun, with enough tumbles to make 
it exciting, and a very substantial reward if 
judgment were used in the picking. The supply 
so laid in often lasted past Christmas, and we had 
little else. Walnuts were too dear. Chestnuts 
we did not know at all, not the eatable kind. 



THE OLD TOWN 151 

The other, the horse-chestnut, made fine ammu- 
nition when, in autumn, we played "robber and 
soldier." The winter storms that drove in wreck- 
age from the Gulf Stream strewed our coast, 
indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole ship 
loads of them, but they were good only for 
making bonfires. The sea or something else had 
cracked them. There was not a kernel in one of 
them. 

It does not seem to me that life could be worth 
much in the Latin School without those nutting 
expeditions. And so, when I went there with 
my own boys, and after wading through the 
old bog where the stork stalked up and down 
fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of the 
forest and found it hedged in with cheeky Ameri- 
can barbed wire and signs up warning intruders 
off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion. This was 
a double disgrace not to be borne. And once 
back again in the land of freedom I planned to 
defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence. Not only 
must it go, but the forest itself must belong to 
the Latin School, or else the undisputed right to 



152 THE OLD TOWN 

go nutting there forever; and while I had it in 
mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge 
of democracy by vesting the control of it in the 
boys, with the proviso that at least once a year 
they should invite the public school boys to be 
their guests there. In my day they fought at 
the drop of a hat; the recollection of the bitter 
feud between them stirs my blood even now when 
I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of 
mice and men ! I was told, when I moved to the 
attack, that times had changed; that school 
was dismissed at two o'clock, not at five, nowa- 
days, and that therefore month's leave as we 
knew it had gone out of existence; that Latin 
School and "plebs" were part of the same sys- 
tem, hence the strife of the old times had ceased ; 
and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made 
century runs and such things, where we went 
nutting. Truly, the times do change. I am glad 
I was a boy then, if I am a back number now. 

Maybe they ride right through the heath on 
their senseless runs, and don't stop to pick Rav- 
linger. If they do, I am done; I have nothing 



THE OLD TOWN 153 

more to say. Ravlinger are the little black ber- 
ries that grow on the creeping heather in the sterile 
moor, quite like our blueberries, only there are 




:~& 



Picking Ravlinger in the Moor. 

many more of them. Very likely you would think 
them sour; we thought them heavenly, and there 
is enough of the boy left in me to back up 
that opinion to-day against the riper judgment of 
the years. We gathered them by the bucketful, 
paying little heed to the heath farmer's warning 
not to touch them after midsummer night, for 
then the devil had greased his boots with them, 
and came home with black faces and hands and 
terrible tales of the "worms" — i.e. snakes — 



154 THE OLD TOWN 

we had encountered in the heath. And, indeed, 
there are enough of these poisonous reptiles there 
yet. But, now as then, a fellow can keep out of 
their way. Some of the dearest recollections of my 
boyhood are of the long tours I made through this 
lonesome moor, where a rare shepherd knitting 
his woollen stocking and a gypsy's cart are often 
the only " humans' ' one meets in a day's journey. 
Met, I should have said, perhaps, for in another 
generation even the moor will be a thing of the 
past. Already half of the six hundred thousand 
acres of heath land in the Danish peninsula has 
been planted with seedling pine, American pine, 
that has grown up finely, and a great and salutary 
change has been wrought, no doubt. But if there 
is to be a day without moor, without heather, 
without the sweet honey the bees gathered there 
when the broom was purple, and without Rav- 
linger, I — well, I am glad I was a boy when I 
was. 

Which brings to my mind an adventure of one 
of my lonely trips in the heath. This one went 
far, extending over a whole vacation week. I 



THE OLD TOWN 155 

had come at the end of a long summer day to an 
inn, where they gave me a big box-bed to sleep in ; 
and I had barely got into it when a lot of scratch- 
ing under me made me aware that a family of 
rats shared my couch. But I was too sleepy to 
care; we snuggled up together and did one an- 
other no harm in the night. I remember it be- 
cause of the terror it caused my mother when she 
heard of it. She had a great dread of rats. It 
was on that same trip that, coming to the shore, 
I supped at a fisherman's hut on smoked dog- 
fish and thought it the finest I had ever tasted. I 
was a boy and hungry. But I do not know why 
it should not be good. The dogfish I am thinking 
of are the small sharks that infest the North Sea 
coast in great numbers. They ate the flesh 
and sold the skin for sandpaper in those days. 
It was scratchy and did very well for that 
purpose. 

The Seem woods, where we went nutting, covered, 
as I said, but a little patch, but a dozen miles to the 
eastward there were real forests, in which a boy 
might get lost ; and there were deer in them, which 



156 THE OLD TOWN 

made a picnic there ever so exciting. That had 
to be engineered by the grown-ups, for it meant 
impressing practically the entire rolling stock 
of the town for the day. Then its half-dozen 
ancient Holsteiners, yellow-wheeled open wagons 
with seats for eight or a dozen, pulled up early in 
the Square, where all upper-tendom was waiting 
with much provender to board them for Gram. 
Many were the dubious headshakes of those who 
were left behind as to the promises of the weather. 
The wind was in the east, and the clouds prophe- 
sied rain. They did that regularly, and they 
kept their promise at least half the time. It 
was sometimes a bedraggled crowd that made 
cover at sunset. But if even half the day was 
fair, it paid well for the trip. The change from 
the barren, rather stern outlook from the Old 
Town, where the sea-wind stunted tree and 
thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing 
in the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it 
so, to the beech woods with their shelter and 
quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation, 
was very alluring. While our elders took tea at 



THE OLD TOWN 157 

the forester's, where the tea-urn was always 
simmering, expecting company, and duly ad- 
mired the furniture in the Countess's drawing- 
room at the Chateau, we boys organized a mighty 
hunt for boar and bear, and sometimes were 
lucky enough to start a roebuck. Then, indeed, 
was the hunt a success, and our minds were 
stocked for many a day to come with stuff for 
day-dreams. 

There was enough of that lying all about, for 
field and heath were dotted with the cairns that 
covered the ashes of the bold vikings. Off to 
the northeast from Gram, buried in a thicket of 
scrub-oak where once had been deep forest, lay a 
large boulder, twice as high as a big man, that 
always seemed to me to span the thousand years 
between the old days and ours as no dry books 
could. Stones are not common in that country; 
this one had come down from Norwegian moun- 
tains on an ice-floe in ages long past. But no 
geological speculation chained our imagination to 
it. It had a story of its own. Harald Blaatand, 
grandfather of Knud (Canute) the Great, had 



158 THE OLD TOWN 

chosen it to put over the grave of his mother, 
Queen Thyra, and was hauling it across the 
country with an army of oxen and thralls, when 
word came that his son had risen against him to 
take the kingdom. He dropped it there to take 
up arms, and there it had been since. The top 
of it was split open. The priest in a neighboring 
parish had tried, a hundred years before, to quarry 
it for his parsonage, but like King Harald was 
halted before he had gone far. What was the 
matter with the parsons in those days, I cannot 
imagine. When they opened the graves of King 
Valdemar and Queen Dagmar, of whom I have 
told elsewhere, they found her tomb a jumble of 
broken brick and rubbish. A priest attached to 
the church, to make a nice roomy burial-place 
for himself, had calmly cut into the resting-place 
of Denmark's best-beloved queen, throwing the 
bones he found there to the scrap-heap. A hun- 
dred years and over, the skull of the gentle Dag- 
mar, which some one had picked up, lay about the 
church and was then carried off by a thief. A 
gold cross the queen had worn was saved, having 



THE OLD TOWN 



159 



" value" in the eyes of the vandals, and in the 
course of time found its way into the possession 




Daqmar's Despoiled Tomb. 

of the government and into the museum of 
antiquities, where it now is, its most precious 
relic. 

" Holme week" was the great time of the year 
for us all. It came late in July, when the hay 
was all in and we got our fishing-tackle out; for 
the hay was the great crop thereabouts, and until 
it had been cut it was not a good thing to be caught 
by the farmer wading through his meadows. 



160 THE OLD TOWN 

Out toward the sea the river made a great bend, 
and in it, near its mouth, lay a stretch of marsh- 
land where the grass grew exceeding rich and 
sweet. This was the "Holme," 1 which in the 
thirteenth century had been given to the town by 
the King in return for its building a wall around 
Ribe the better to defend it. The wall was never 
built, though they got so far as digging a ditch, 
but they kept the land, and after the Reformation 
divided it up among themselves, to their great gain. 
When now the last of the hay had been cut and 
stacked, the Old Town went a-picnicing, bag 
and baggage. Those who could afford it drove 
out; those who couldn't walked, or sailed, or 
rowed out, depending on a lift from the tide to 
help them back. And all of them had hampers 
or baskets, filled to the brim. There is no occasion 
that I know of in Denmark when these are left 
behind. There, on the meadow that was like a 
smooth, green-carpeted floor, they sported and 
ran and tumbled, pelting one another with hay, 
children and grown-ups together, all day. I never 

1 Meaning islands. 



THE OLD TOWN 161 

knew who paid for the hay, or if it was just a con- 
tribution to the general good-will of the time, but 
no one ever put a damper on our fun. The 
climax of it for us boys was always the attack on 
the Fold, a kind of fort on the meadow into which 
the cattle were driven in case of flood. The Fold 
had earth walls and a living hedge, and to roll off 
that wall with a bloody nose, or better still, to climb 
over it and give the other fellow one, was enough to 
make any boy feel like a real hero, especially with 
the girls looking on and showing great concern. 
When the sun set over the meadows and we 
came back from our campaign, tired and sore, 
supper was spread on the grass beside a comfort- 
able hay-stack, and it was good. There is nothing 
anywhere half so good to eat when you are hun- 
gry as the Danish Smorrebrod, particularly the 
kind they make in Ribe. Only, I guess, you've 
got to have a boy's stomach, for you will want to 
eat it all, and the last time I did — well, never 
mind ! I will lay that up against my American 
training. It never happened when I was a boy 
but once ; that was when a ship had been wrecked 

M 



162 THE OLD TOWN 

with a cargo of Messina raisins, and the man who 
had bought it saw us snooping around where he 
had laid those raisins out to dry on great tarpau- 
lins and told us we might eat as many as we liked. 
We did, and ouch ! let me forget it. I sure 
thought I was going to die. 

In the gloaming they lit tallow candles set in 
beer bottles in the dancing tent, and to the tune 
of an old cracked fiddle everybody had a turn on 
the sod with everybody else. If there were 
classes and distinctions in the Old Town, there 
were none out there. The Bishop's wife or the 
Rector's daughter danced with the shoemaker's 
lad and had a good time. The old ferry raft that 
was pulled from shore to shore with a rope, plied 
back and forth over the river, carrying great loads 
of hay one way, and bigger and bigger loads of 
merry-makers from the town, for those were the 
midsummer nights when nobody kept account of 
time. That was the Old Town's real holiday. 
It came to an end with the third Sunday, I think 
it was, in July, after which the cattle were turned 
in to graze on the Holme and the herdsman was 




In Holme Week — The Old Ferry Raft. 



THE OLD TOWN 163 

left in sole possession; by no means a sinecure, 
for soon the North Sea gave warning that at any 
moment his life and the safety of his charges 
might be at stake, if they were outstripped in the 
race with the angry floods. 

But while the sea yet slumbered in summer 
sunshine we boys had our shore days, and they 
were fine. Then we arose with the sun and 
walked the four miles to the beach, which there- 
abouts is very flat and wide. When the tide is 
out, there is a stretch of quite half a mile of white 
sand to deep water. Over this the flood-tide 
comes stealing in so stealthily, yet so swiftly, 
that it takes a pretty good runner to get to the 
land without very wet feet or worse, if he is caught 
far out by the turn of the tide. We would some- 
times bring home quite a store of amber from 
these trips, and then little files would be busy for 
days making hearts, sabots, and other trinkets 
for the girl each boy liked best. Hearts were the 
most popular and also the easiest to fashion. We 
made those things ourselves, and it was a sort of 
manual training not to be despised. 



164 THE OLD TOWN 

"Treading" flounders was a unique kind of 
fishing that took a whole day from earliest dawn, 
but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish than 
one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was 
needed for that, when there was no "wash." 
The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping 
hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by 
the church on the island out in the sea. When 
they had gone as far as they wanted, they tramped 
back by another route, and then put in the long 
wait till the tide had come in and was ebbing 
again, building fires, catching crabs, or whatever 
they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came 
their harvest. Following their tracks of the morn- 
ing, they would find, wherever they had made 
them deep enough, a little pool left by the reced- 
ing waters, and in each pool one or two, and some- 
times three, flounders about the size of my hand, 
very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the 
Pacific. These they would unceremoniously heave 
into a sack they carried between them, and before 
long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that 
the bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with 



THE OLD TOWN 165 

multitudes of these fish, which served the island- 
ers of that coast as both meat and bread. They 
dried and toasted them, and served them with 
their afternoon coffee, and you might look long 
for a better dish. I think of it often as being quite 
like Tvebak 1 slightly salted, only better to my 
youthful taste. 

Out along the river mouth was famous hunting for 
water-fowl. In the migrating season great flocks 
of duck alighted there, and geese and every other 
kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of 
the sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It 
prophesied rain, we said, and the promise was 
usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first 
telegraph line was built to the Old Town, and 
that autumn an odd thing happened. Morning 
after morning dozens of shore-birds were found 
dead under the wires. We thought first that the 
electric current had slain them as they roosted 
on the wires ; but as it was apparent that some 
of them couldn't roost that way, a better explana- 
tion was sought and found. They had been killed 
1 Tvebak is Danish for Zwieback. 



166 THE OLD TOWN 

flying against the wires. It seems that they were 
strung just at the height at which they flew. It 
is clear to me that birds have some power of 
reasoning, for after a while we found no more 
dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher, 
or lower perhaps. 

Once or twice in autumn, on their way south, 
great flights of kramsfowl, a bird highly es- 
teemed by the cook, roosted in the Plantage, a 
little grove just outside of town. Just when that 
would be, no one could tell, but for weeks after 
the leaves began to turn some of us set our snares, 
— a willow bough bent in a triangle, with horse- 
hair loops in each of the uprights, and baited 
with rowan-berries below. The bird would sit 
and swing in the triangle, and, bending to get at 
the berries under its feet, would put its head 
through one or both of the loops and be strangled. 
Morning after morning we would sneak out be- 
fore breakfast to look to our snares and come 
home empty-handed. Then some brisk morning, 
when the first touch of frost was in the air, we 
would drag such loads of the big black birds into 



THE OLD TOWN 



167 



town that there would be talk of it for days. 
Every sick person we knew had a feast, and we 
felt that we were mighty hunters indeed. 



v,r^ 



j j 



















Cruising up to the Seem Church. 

So there was no lack of sport in the Old Town, 
and I haven't begun to tell you of it all. In 
the winter there was the river that was then 
dammed back and became a great frozen lake 
five or six miles long. Then we would strap on 



168 THE OLD TOWN 

our skates good and tight for a long trip, and go 
cruising up from the Kannegrove, 1 the big ditch 
down by the Cloister, to the Seem church, clear at 
the further end, and, spreading our jackets out, let 
the wind use them as sails on the run back. I 
tell you we came down in a hurry. No time for 
fancy skating then. But a mighty sharp lookout 
had to be kept on that trip, for if a skate slid into a 
crack there was a wrench and a fall, and it was 
apt to be a bad one. When the snow lay deep, 
there was such coasting as you do not often find. 
For though the country was flat as a pancake, 
the Castle Hill was there with its deep moat. Al- 
most clear up on the other side the rush would 
fetch you. I haven't seen a better coasting hill 
in New England. But, on the other hand, I 
must own that American boys are "up" on steer- 
ing to an extent we didn't dream of. The "leg 
out" is a Yankee invention, and it is great. We 
just slid. 

1 The " cleric's " or "clerk's ditch" that skirted the monks' 
garden in the old days. The garden is still there, and traces 
of the ditch. 



CHAPTER VII 




RlBERHUS. 



To the west 
of the Old 
Town, with 
only the dry 
moat and a 
fringe of gar- 
1 dens between, 
stood the green 
Castle Hill. 



Green it was and had been in the memory 
of the oldest. The road-makers of three gener- 
ations before had taken what the house-builder 
had left of the ruins that alone remained 
of Denmark's once great historic stronghold. 
There its fighting kings guarded the land 
against the enemy to the south; thence its ar- 
mies had marched to victory or defeat in many a 
fight with the turbulent German barons. Thither 
came the merchant ships of Europe bringing stone 
from the Rhine for the Domkirke, sweet wines and 

169 



170 THE OLD TOWN 

silken raiment for the ladies of the court, and 
cloth from Flanders; for to be well dressed in 
those days a man's coat must have been cut in 
Ribe. The river was long since sanded in, in my 
day, and ships came that way no more. A few 
lonesome sheep were picketed on the green hill, 
and when at night the white mist crept in from 
the sea, blurring and blotting the landscape out, 
their melancholy bleating alone betrayed the site 
where once the clash of arms waked ready echoes. 
Here dwelt King Valdemar and his gentle queen 
who live in the Danish folk-song. Of her after 
seven centuries the ploughman sang yet : 

She came without burden, she came with peace, 
She came the good peasant to cheer. 

The ballad tells of the brief year of bliss the royal 
lovers lived here, of his wild ride across the heath 
to her death-bed, and of the daring May party that 
won back the castle from a traitorous garrison for 
"King Erik the young. " Last summer they dug 
in the Castle Hill and found little enough there. 
But here on my table stands a brick from the 
stout wall, that long since crossed the ocean with 



THE OLD TOWN 171 

me. It may be that there is magic in the stone 
to tell of the past, for it was fashioned by monks 
who knew more than the pater-nosters they told 
on their beads; or is it that I am of Queen Dag- 
mar's kin, her god-son, christened as I was in the 
font she gave to the Domkirke: last night as I 
sat alone pondering the old songs, the flickering 
shadows from my study fire touched it, and I 
dreamed again the story of King Valdemar and 
Riberhus. 1 

I dreamed that I saw a great throng on land 
and shore, men and women in holiday garments, 
straining their eyes seaward, where a ship with 
golden dragon's head was making its way slowly 
between low islands. As it came into full view, 
the people broke into jubilant cheers: " Wel- 
come Dagmar, Denmark's Queen!" It was the 
King's ship bringing his bride from her far Bo- 
hemian home. Answering cries came back from 
the crew, and with music and the waving of 
many banners the splendid vessel sailed up the 
channel. At the rail stood a golden-haired 
princess with the King's messenger and friend. 
1 The Ribe House, or Ribe Castle. 



172 THE OLD TOWN 

Her eyes were wet, but there was a happy smile 
upon her lips. Her glance sought the lonely 
figure of a horseman on the beach whose prancing 
steed champed its bit impatiently. Where he 
rode the crowd fell back and made room. 

"What knight rides yonder on the white 
charger?" she asked; "never saw I kinglier 



man." 



"Hail thee, fair Queen ! that first of Denmark's 
sons thou sawest is thy royal bridegroom," was the 
answer. "It is King Valdemar, whom his people 
call ' Victor/ with cause." 

Then I heard a louder, more joyous cry than 
before, and I saw the people thronging about, 
striving to kiss the hem of her robe as she stood 
upon the quay that was laid with crimson cloth 
for her feet. I saw the King bend his knee and 
kiss her hand and her brow ; and the people went 
wild at the sight. They took her horses out of 
their harness, and themselves drew the chaise 
toward the city with the many spires, singing 
and shouting their joy; and I saw that she was 
glad and that the young King who rode by her 



THE OLD TOWN 173 

side was proud and happy. I saw them walk up 
the broad aisle of the Domkirke together, fol- 
lowed by many brave knights and fair ladies, and 
before the altar they knelt and were blest by the 
venerable priest who had held the King in his 
arms at his christening. The bells of the thirteen 
churches and chapels in the town were rung, and 
masses were said for the twain at their altars. 
And I heard many a wassail drunk at the wedding- 
feast in the great halls of the castle and in the 
thronged streets of the town, where torches 
burned from sundown to sunrise and the people 
made merry through the long summer nights. 
Strong ale and mead from the royal cellars ran 
like a river, for such was the custom of the times 
and of the people. 

But before the sun had set twice I heard a new 
song in the Ribe streets which the very children 
learned with joy. It told of the Queen's " morn- 
ing-gift" from her lord. "Ask," he said; " what- 
ever thy wish, of land or gold, it shall be thine." 
But she prayed for neither greatness nor riches, 
but that the plough-tax that bore heavily on the 



174 THE OLD TOWN 

husbandman be forgiven him ; and that the peas- 
ants who, for rising against it, were laid in irons 
be set free. And the King granted her prayer. 
Ever since, the Danish people have given Dag- 
mar's name to their best-beloved queens. " Day- 
break" was the meaning of it in the old tongue, 
and she was their hope and heart's desire. 

Then darkness fell ; and I saw the King resting 
after the chase in a far-distant place. In the 
west there arose a cloud of dust, and at the sight 
of it his heart misgave him, for his happiness had 
been too great for man. Out of it came one rid- 
ing fast with evil tidings: "The Queen is sick 
unto death. She bids the King make haste." And 
there came to me the voices of women singing at 
their spinning-wheels as I heard them when I was 
a child ; and this was the burden of their song : 

_ Andante, i . 

Jl 1- N f 



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m -m | <? mo 

When the King he rode out of Skan - der - borg 

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THE OLD TOWN 



175 



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one 



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dred men. 



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■al si 



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But when he 



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rode o - ver Ri - be Bridge 

j n i n 



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6 0- 

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Then rode 
— £ 



the King a - lo 



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ne. 



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i« — •- 



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In Ring - sted sleepeth Queen Dag - mar! 



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176 THE OLD TOWN 

Over the wildsome moor he had come, neither 
resting nor sleeping, his face set ever toward the 
sea, the one wild prayer in his heart that he might 
not be too late. But ride man ever so fast, death 
travels faster. As his horse's hoofs struck fire 
from the stones in Gronnegade, 1 with the castle 
beyond the pillared gate at its end, the Ribe 




The King's Ride over the Moor. 

church bells rang out the tidings of Dagmar's 

death. 

Now help, O Lord, my Dagmar dear, 

Me thinketh my heart must break. 

On his knees at her bed the King begs her 
weeping women to pray that she may speak to 
him once more, and the Queen opens her eyes and 

1 Green Street, the street leading to the Green where the 
castle stood. 



THE OLD TOWN 177 

smiles upon her lover. "Fear not for me," she 
says, "I did no worse sin than to lace my silken 
sleeves on Sunday." And her last thought as her 
first is for her people. She prays him to pardon 
every outlaw, and with her dying breath pleads 
with him not to take Bengerd to his heart. "The 
evil Bengerd," the ballad calls her, and evil did she 
bring to Denmark. For, when in after years the 
King did marry the Portuguese princess, whose 
beauty was so great that even her dust after ages 
bore witness to it, she brought King and land but 
sorrow and misery, aye ! and of both a full 
measure. 1 

1 Of her three sons, Abel slew his brother Erik for the 
crown, and was himself slain by a peasant in the highway. 
His body was buried in a swamp, with a stake driven through 
the heart to lay his grievous ghost. Christopher, who took 
the sceptre last, was poisoned by a monk in the sacrament 
as he knelt at the altar rail in the Domkirke; and in the 
division of the kingdom between the brothers that gave 
cause for their quarrels, began Denmark's woes, which in our 
own day culminated in her dismemberment, when Germany 
took Slesvig, Abel's dukedom. Queen Bengerd herself was 
the worst-hated woman in Danish history, as Dagmar is yet 
the best-beloved. In death the people's hatred would not let 
her rest. When her grave was opened in my boyhood, it was 



178 THE OLD TOWN 

But these things were not yet. Still I dreamed 
by my study lamp. I saw a mighty host of men 
and ships; fifteen hundred sail did I count in line. 
But the men wore no fine raiment; they were 
clad in steel and carried battle-axes and swords. 
Every knight wore on his left shoulder a cru- 
sader's cross. And I saw the King, grown stern 
and gray, lead them toward a foreign shore, where 
there dwelt men who worshipped idols. And 
there by night the pagan hosts fell upon them in 
such multitudes that the King's men were swal- 
lowed up as sands by the sea. I saw them strug- 
gling in darkness and dread in which no man knew 
friend from foe, and the Christians were driven 
back in despair, their standards taken; and a 
great cry arose that all was lost. 

Then I beheld a wondrous thing. I saw a 
strange banner descending as if from the clouds, 
over against the hills upon which the priests were 

found that the stone slab which covered it had been pried off 
and a round boulder dropped in the place made for her head. 
Yet her beautiful black braid was there, and the skull, so 
delicate in its perfect oval, that those who saw it marvelled 
greatly. 




" For God and the King." 



THE OLD TOWN 179 

calling upon God for victory. It was crimson 
red ; and in it was a great white cross, even the one 
upon which our Lord was crucified for the sins of 
the whole world. And a loud voice cried, "Bear 
this high, and victory shall be yours. " And the 
heathen saw and heard and were stricken with 
fear; for now they knew, indeed, that they were 
fighting the Lord God of Hosts, and that their 
strength was as a broken reed. And as the ensign 
fell among the battling hordes I saw a tall knight 
who rode before the King seize it and, holding it 
high, spur his horse into the bravest of the fight, 
with the cry "For God and the King." 

And I saw the King's men take heart and the 
heathen turn and flee from the shore that was 
strewn with their slain, while the sea ran red 
with blood. And the King and his men rested 
their swords and knelt upon the battlefield as the 
moon rose over it, and sang a Te Deum to their 
God for having delivered them and crushed the 
power of the Evil One ; for of the Fiend and of his 
idols there was an end in the land, then and for- 
evermore. And I knew that I had seen in my 



180 THE OLD TOWN 

dream the battle of Lyndanissa that won all 
Esthland for the Christians' God by King Valde- 
mar's sword, and gave to Denmark its Danne- 
brog, oldest of flags among nations. 

Once more did darkness fall, and I saw the old 
King betrayed by night in his tent, in the midst 
of peace, by his guest, the Black Count Henrik 
of Schwerin, who hated him, and, with Dagmar's 
son, brought, bound and gagged, "in great haste 
and fear/' to the traitor's strong tower on the 
Elbe. I saw them lying in chains, thirty moons 
and more in the dark dungeons, while Denmark's 
foes rose on every side and overwhelmed its 
armies that had lost hope with their leader. I 
saw the old marshal, the King's kinsman and 
friend, brought wounded and chained to his cell 
after the battle; and the aged King bowed his 
head while his enemies mocked him. And I saw 
the prince with Dagmar's blue eyes and fair locks 
comfort him in his sorrow and defeat. And then 
I saw the Danish women, matron and maid, in 
the proud castle and in the peasant's hut, bring 
their gold and their gems, their rings and their 




"The King and his men knelt upon the battlefield." 




j/5 «>-. : & ' -U * a ^ o *- 



Danish Women ransomed their King. 



THE OLD TOWN 



181 



jewels and their silver, for their King's ransom; 
and once more the Old Town echoed with cries 
of gladness and joy as when Dagmar came; but 
this time he rode alone, and stricken and sore. 




"Comforted the King in sorrow and defeat." 



Once again in my dreams I saw the gates of 
the tower swing wide and a mighty army march 
forth to meet the German traitors in battle, to 
avenge their King. And I saw the great barren 
where the bones of the fairest knights in all the 



182 THE OLD TOWN 

North lay bleaching in many a summer's sun from 
that day, while all the Danish land mourned. 
I saw the day all but won when the base Hol- 
steiners turned their arms against their Danish 
allies, and I beheld the sun set in defeat and dis- 
aster and the King borne, wounded and beaten, 
from the field, his army destroyed, his wars ended. 
But still were his people faithful, in evil days 
as in good. I saw King Valdemar, now blinded 
and white and bent, put away the sword and 
write laws for his land that in the evening of his 
life earned him the name of the Wise Law-giver; 
for the landmarks he set, the justice he did between 
man and man, endure unto this day. I saw the 
last crushing sorrow fall upon him when Dag- 
mar's son was killed on the chase by a friend's 
arrow. And I saw the mightiest of Danish 
rulers breathe out his great soul in the fulness 
of his days. And as I awoke I heard the voice 
of the old chronicler, when Valdemar was gathered 
to his fathers: "Truly then fell the crown from 
the heads of Danish men." For never since has 
Denmark seen his like. 



THE OLD TOWN 183 

The embers in my fireplace glowed and the 
stone from the old tower showed red. Once 
more I saw, as in a dream, the castle on the hill. 
It was night, and there were lights in the windows 
and sounds of noisy revelry within. On the 
green by the river men and women were dancing. 
The girls had daisies and the young leaf of the 
beech braided in their hair, for it was May-day. 
The men wore long muffling cloaks that hid 
their armor and their swords. They were danc- 
ing "May into town" in the glad fashion of the 
day, and into the castle too, where the captain 
was making merry with his men. He had be- 
trayed the King's cause into the hands of his 
enemies and sold his soul, with his faith, for their 
gold. Little did he dream who was dancing over 
the drawbridge which the sentinels let down at 
his bidding: 

They danced them over the Ribe Bro, (bridge) 
There danceth the knight with pointed shoe 
For Erik, for young King Erik. 

Over the bridge and into the castle they danced, 
and into the great hall where the faithless Tage 



184 THE OLD TOWN 

Muus and his men sat drinking deep to the suc- 
cess of their deviltry, hammering a mirthful 
welcome on the table with their tankards as the 
doors swung open for the May party. They 
trod the dance lightly before them, the men 
waving torches and the women weaving flowery 
garlands about them, and the knaves hailed them 
uproariously; but the shout died in their throats 
as, at a signal from their leader, the women seized 
the torches and the men dropped their cloaks 
and fell upon the revellers with drawn swords. 
For they were the King's men, and Ribe was loyal 
if the captain of the castle was false. So it was 
won by a May dance 

For Erik, for young King Erik, 

Valdemar's son, and his banner flew once more 
from its walls, while the dungeon claimed the 
traitors. 

Thus I dreamed. And I thought that I slept 
seven centuries and saw the green Castle Hill 
once more with its lonesome sheep looking into 
the sunset; with its billowing reeds in the deep 
moats that whisper to the west wind of the great 



THE OLD TOWN 185 

days that were; with the sleepy little town by 
the shallow river, its glory gone, its ships gone, 
the world gone from it, forgotten even as — no, 
not that. For the great name, the great past, 
live for all time, and that which I have written 
is not a dream. It is the story of the castle that 
stood upon the green hill, and of its king. It is 
the story of Riberhus. 



CHAPTER VIII 



. v? •-■ 







The big pear 
tree that hung 
over our way to 
school is gone, 
; but the hawthorn 
hedge remains. 
When our young 
feet trod those 
toppy pavements, 
the tree smoothed 
the thorny path to 
learning in a way all its own. The late summer 
season when the sun shone so temptingly on the 
round red pears, and the old woman over whose 
garden wall they grew counted her profits at a 
skilling for two, fell in with our time for prac- 
tising markmanship, just as the spring brought 
its marbles and September its nutting tramps. 

186 



^#% 



Jackdaws in Council. 



THE OLD TOWN 187 

Then if it befell that a good shot and the law 
of gravitation operated simultaneously to dis- 
lodge the biggest and juiciest pear, and it dropped 
in our path — surely destiny was to blame, not 
we. Findings is keepings, and there is no law 
against picking up a pear in the street. The 
stork on the Rector's house looked on unmoved. 
Being in a way responsible for us, perhaps he 
was resigned to the ways of boys. Not so the 
old woman who counted upon our skillings. 
She stormed in the doorway, much exercised 
in spirit, and threatened to report us. I think 
she did once or twice, for we were warned not 
to go under the tree when pears were falling. 
But there was no other way out. And we de- 
tected, or thought we did, a twinkle in the old 
Rector's eye while he took us to task. He had 
been a boy himself ; was yet, despite the infirmi- 
ties of years, beneath his mask of official stern- 
ness. And we evened it up with the pear woman 
by loyally investing our pennies with her when 
we had them. 

The Latin School had always been just across 



188 THE OLD TOWN 

from the Domkirke with which it had come into 
existence, and in the old house I was born, the 
teachers having lodgings under its roof at that 
time. But it was moved as the tie between church 
and school was loosened, and it was thus that the 
feud was bred with the pear woman, who had until 
then dwelt in seclusion and peace. That we 
came honestly by our proficiency in marksmanship 
I gather from the fact that, when the ecclesiasti- 
cal bond was stronger a good deal than in our day, 
it made its mark in the pages of the Old Town's 
history by picking the very Domkirke itself for a 
target. It is on record that the churchwarden 
complained of the boys snow-balling its windows. 
Of several hundred window-panes in the west 
front only seven were then whole ; but, he added, 
"it is no use sending for the glazier to put them 
in while the snow is on the ground, for they will 
as surely be smashed again.' ' Evidently union 
of pedagogue and priest had not bred reverence 
in their pupils. They were the vandals who, 
when the Reformation had consigned to the lumber 
room the fine old crucifix that hangs once more in 



THE OLD TOWN 189 

its rightful place since the late restoration, amused 
themselves by trimming the nails of the image. 
But that time they got their deserving, if the rod 
had been spared by man too long. According 
to tradition they lost their own finger nails, and it 
served them right, too. They were sad old days, 
when to put reverence and common sense, with 
common decency, in the rag-bag was held to be a 
mark of piety. Clear down into our day we heard 
the echo of it. When, in the '4Q's, the Dom- 
kirke was undergoing repairs, the stone coffin of 
one of the old kings was carried off, and after a 
long search was discovered serving as a horse- 
trough in front of a public house. "To what 
base uses — ! ' ' It would not have been recovered 
at that, but for peremptory notice from the 
government that it had better turn up without 
delay. There is nothing in their past record 
to forbid the suspicion that the Latin school- 
boys had had a hand in raping the royal 
tomb. 

So, if it does not fall to the lot of every man to 
have an alma mater dating back to the time of 



190 THE OLD TOWN 

the crusades (the school was founded in 1137, 
or very soon after), the fact of having it is not 
necessarily a warrant of saintliness. It was not 
with us. I have recounted some of our pranks. 
For them, if they went beyond the limit, there 
was still the rod. That and the big book with 
red letters and the iron chain riveted to it that 
lay in the school library were the visible sur- 
vivals of a past day. Concerning the latter there 
was a belief current among the untaught that it 
was in fact Cyprianus, the book with which the 
priest could cast a spell and bid the devil come 
and go as he saw fit, but which the hand of no 
unlearned man might touch without instant peril 
to life and soul. It was, as a matter of fact, the 
Bible that was held in such regard. The chain 
that gave it its grewsome aspect was testimony 
merely to its rarity and the cost of paper and 
printer's ink in the day that made so sure it would 
not get lost. All of which made little or no 
impact upon the belief that the devil was firmly 
chained between its pages, and that it was a good 
plan to give it a wide berth. 



THE OLD TOWN 191 

No mediaeval superstition was needed to con- 
vince us of the wisdom of that plan when it came 
to the rod. Its ceremonial use, so to speak, had 
fallen into disuse. I mean by that the great 
capital occasions when, for hopeless breach of 
discipline or for disgracing the school before the 
world, a pupil was flogged by the janitor in the 
presence of the assembled school, after a lecture 
by the Rector, and publicly expelled. No such 
emergency arose in my day. But in a more 
private and sufficiently intimate way it was still 
part of the curriculum. The daily cudgelling of 
dull heads was supposed to have a stimulating 
effect upon the intellect. It was the custom of 
the day, but its sun was setting even then. Is it 
merely harking back to personal experience that 
I sometimes think a boy is just pining for a whip- 
ping and won't be happy till he gets it ; and that, 
having got it, he feels justified, squared as it were, 
and ready for a new and better start? Or, is it 
faith in the boy's fundamental love of fair play 
that sizes up the offence and its deserving? I 
will let the teacher decide. Somewhere I have 



192 THE OLD TOWN 

told of my first introduction to the "kids' school/ ' 
kept by an old "she-wolf," and its educational 
equipment. I was dragged all the way to it by 
an exasperated house-maid, hammering the pave- 
ment with my heels and yelling at the top of my 
voice. Forbearance at home had, it seems, 
ceased to be a virtue. There was none in the 
ogre who received me at the door and forthwith 
thrust me into a barrel down in the cellar, where it 
was dark, and putting on the lid, snarled through 
the bung-hole that that was the way bad boys 
were dealt with in school. Good boys were given 
kringler to eat. When from sheer fright I ceased 
howling, I was set free and conducted to the yard, 
where there was a sow with a litter of pigs. The 
sow had a slit in the ear to which my attention 
was invited. It was for being lazy, and when 
boys were lazy — the ogre brandished the long 
shears that hung at her belt — zip ! I earned a 
kringle that very afternoon. 

The ways of the Latin School were still stamped 
with the old severity, but there was some ap- 
proach to present-day methods of constitutional 



THE OLD TOWN 193 

government. The faculty took hardened cases 
under advisement. Execution of judgment was 
vested in the Rector, as gentle an old man as ever 
unwillingly caned a boy, whose guileless soul was 
no match for our practised wiles. A remorseful 
howl put him instantly out of action, and he was 
always ready to be led sympathetically along the 
slippery paths of boyish excuses; for, however 
much the boy's soul may pine for just punish- 
ment, his body will always struggle to escape it. 
We had a singing-teacher, the organist of the 
Domkirke, whom, seeing that he was a helpless 
old bachelor without proper home or boys of his 
own, we accounted our lawful prey. Accord- 
ingly the candle snuffer sputtered with powder 
to his mild amazement, mice haunted the piano 
and struck unexpected chords at singing-school, 
and the blackboard sponge performed unheard- 
of antics as an impromptu foot-ball while the 
organist was writing our lesson on the board. It 
was when he happened to turn suddenly once 
and caught me in the very act of aiming it at his 
wig, that the worm turned. I was conducted 



194 THE OLD TOWN 

straight upstairs to the Rector, with corpus 
delicti in my grasp, and left to his mercy. 

Rector rose mechanically from his papers 
when the door closed and opened a cupboard to 
afford me a private view of the stick standing 
there. Then he came over to me and said sternly, 
pointing to the sponge, "What is this?" 

"The sponge, Herr Rektor," I said. "It 
was on the floor and I kicked it, like this — " 
it bounded across to the table — "and Niels, 
he — ' 7 

"Ah," Rector was all interest; "Niels, he — ?" 

"He kicked it — so, and it landed where Hans 
stood." 

"Eh!" he was rubbing his hands; "and 
Hans?" 

"Hans, he sent it — this way — to Peter; and 
Peter trod on it, and it shied to Anders. And 
he — " 

We were skipping across the room together, 
mapping out the journeys of the vagrant sponge 
as fast as Rector's gout allowed, when we arrived 
at the turn. 



THE OLD TOWN 



195 



"It came back to me," I explained, "and I was 
just going to fire it — " 

"Ha ! you were just going to fire it — " 
"When the organist turned and caught me.' ' 
The Rector stopped rubbing his hands ab- 
ruptly. We gazed at one another soberly for a 







U*r> 



X 



n 



yzfo*^. 




S&w V\ e*— 'V 



LiS 



"Ha! you were just going to fire it — " 



full minute. I don't know, I think I saw the 
suspicion of a wink ; then : 

"I think you said this was a sponge. Go then 
and tell the organist that you have discovered it 
is not a ball. Now go." 

I went quickly. Unless my ears deceived me, 
I heard a chuckle behind the door as it fell to. 



196 THE OLD TOWN 

Little as he relished the job of thrashing a boy, 
the Rector hated meanness in him worse. It 
was the discovery of such a streak in me that 
brought me the most thorough caning of my 
school life at his hands. Hans and I, who peren- 
nially disputed the seat next to the head of the 
class — when it stood in a circle — had been 
engaged in a combat that was undecided when 
the bell summoned us to our lessons. Flushed 
with the hope of victory, Hans hit upon the idea 
of setting the clock ahead, that we might the 
sooner have it out. The clock was in our class 
room, and it was easily enough done, but in his 
eagerness Hans forgot prudence and set it three- 
quarters of an hour ahead, so that recitations 
were no sooner begun than they were at an end. 
Whereupon there was an investigation, and the 
culprit was found. This was a matter that called 
for the big stick, as being at once dishonest and 
foolish, and Hans was commanded to wait after 
school had gone home. 

Now it befell that I was getting a book out of 
the library in the next room when Hans' shrieks 



THE OLD TOWN 197 

rose high between the dull thuds of "Master 
Erik." I will not attempt to excuse my conduct; 
I despise it. Probably the defeat I had so nar- 
rowly escaped rankled. I crept up to the door 
and listened. Meanly rejoicing at his plight, I 
pressed my ear to the key-hole to hear more, and 
leaned with my whole weight. I hadn't noticed 
that the door was not shut tight, and suddenly 
it swung open, and I fell into the other room with 
my arm full of books, — fell right at Rector's feet 
and lay sprawling there. 

He gave me an amazed glance, paused an in- 
stant with uplifted stick, and comprehended. A 
look of stern disgust swept over his face; he let 
go of Hans and, seizing me, administered to me 
the worse half of the interrupted thrashing. 
Hans got square. I can see him yet as he stood 
in his corner wiping his eyes to keep from grinning. 
The utterly exasperating thing about it was the 
look of shocked innocence at the disclosure of 
such baseness that sat upon his face. As if 
he — ugh ! 

The good old Rector stands flanked by his 



198 



THE OLD TOWN 



staff in the picture, in full dress, as beseems his 
dignity. My father is on his right, the only one 




The Latin School Teachers. 



who wears a cap. Herr Kinch, behind the Rec- 
tor, was an antiquarian of no mean repute, and 



THE OLD TOWN 199 

wrote the history of the Old Town/ making a 
notable contribution to Danish annals thereby. 
The venerable face that peers out beside him is 
that of Dr. Helms, whose interest in and writings 
about the Domkirke, through a long lifetime, fi- 
nally bore fruit in the thorough restoration that 
has been just completed. We boys held the 
candle for him sometimes when he was poking in 
the dark corners for signs of the long past. Once 
he found what he was not looking for. It was 
while he was delving in the foundations of the 
Maria tower, which had been torn down a century 
or two before, being unsafe. They had covered 
up the foundations and shut them out of sight. 
But there must have been a crack somewhere, 
for when the good doctor broke into the dark 
space, thousands of bats broke out. The air was 
literally filled with the creepy things. The Old 
Town was at all times full of bats, and this was 
evidently one of their secret hiding-places. There 
were dead bats, too, by the cart load. 

1 It is upon his "History of Ribe Town," in two stout 
volumes, that I have drawn in these sketches for the an- 
cient records that enliven its pages. 



200 THE OLD TOWN 

The other face in the doorway, that of Adjunct 
Koch, the same who in after years became Dean 
of the Domkirke, I can never see without think- 
ing of the hour of my great triumph. He and 
Herr Trugaard were my history teachers. History 
as taught in the schools of those days was largely 
made up of interminable files of kings, with the 
years of their reign, nothing else, to be memo- 
rized that way. This I could not do, or would 
not ; the result was the same, — a bad exami- 
nation. But these two had discovered some- 
thing. When the Great Examen came round 
again, instead of bringing up the tedious kings, 
they asked me to tell about the Hundred Days 
of Napoleon after Elba. Napoleon had not been 
dead forty years then, and there were people 
everywhere who had fought in his wars. We 
had one in our school, an old sergeant who 
drilled us in gymnastics. He had been through 
the campaign that ended at Waterloo, and was 
never tired of telling how it froze so hard in 
the winter of 1814 that they cut the wine 
for the army rations with axes, and of the 



THE OLD TOWN 201 

fighting he had seen, of course. Poor fellow ! 
He looked too long upon the wine when it was red, 
and marched to his death in the river one winter's 
night singing a war-song, thinking perhaps he 
was at Borodino. They found him standing dead 
in the mud, upright, as a man and a soldier should, 
with his face to the foe who he imagined held the 
other shore. 

I had sat at his feet when they strayed un- 
steadily toward the great past, many a time. 
And I needed no second invitation to enter upon 
the campaign of the Hundred Days. A sudden 
transformation came over that dusty class-room ; 
for veterans sat in the Board of Censors. In 
five minutes I had them sitting up, eagerly scan- 
ning the camps of the French and the Allied 
Armies as I drew them. In ten they were on 
their feet, striding from Ligny to Quatre Bras, 
to the Wavre turnpike, objecting, applauding, 
disputing with me and with one another as I led 
them from field to field of slaughter and finally 
rounded them up at Waterloo, brought Blucher 
to the relief of Wellington in the nick of time, 



202 THE OLD TOWN 

and charged the Old Guard with a yell of " Sur- 
render V only to be met with the immortal reply: 
"The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders." 

We sat down, a hot, excited band. There was 
a quiet gleam in Herr Trugaard's eye as he pro- 
nounced the unanimous judgment of the Board: 
"ug + ," that is, Al and to spare. It was the only 
"ug" I earned in my school days. It ought to 
have given the pedagogues food for thought, and 
perhaps it did. 

The bell that once called the monks to prayers 
summoned us to school at a quarter to eight, and 
in the long winter we sang our morning hymn 
with the dawn struggling through the windows. 
When we trooped home again with knapsacks 
strapped on our backs, it was night once more. 
From eight to five was our day, with two hours 
for noon, the rule in all the Old Town's affairs. 
The bell regulated our lives as it had done since 
hour-glasses marked the time. It rings yet at 
the old hours, though the school-day is entirely 
changed, and Venus who rang it has long been 
gathered to her fathers. But when the Great 



THE OLD TOWN 203 

Examen drew near, it was too slow for our guilty 
consciences, and the night-watchman was bribed 
to wake us up. So that he should not rouse the 
whole house, a string was hung out of the window, 
the other end of which was tied securely to the 
sleeper's toe or ankle. The watchman's order 
was to pull it till the boy responded, and he did. 
Perhaps he took the chance to pay off old scores. 
He pulled and pulled with might and main, until 
a red and swollen foot shot up to the window and 
behind it an angry face yelling to let go. The 
boy was awake and up, and the watchman clat- 
tered on his way, chanting his morning verse: 

Ho ! Watchman, our clock it has struck four ! 

Eternal God, all honor 

In Heaven's choir to Thee, 

Thou who art watchman ever 

For us on earth that be. 

Now ended is our watch, 

For a good night 

Give God the thanks 

And mind ye well the time. 

Before his song died away among the old houses, 
we were hard at work cramming for examination. 



204 THE OLD TOWN 

This service was set down to his credit when in 
Christmas week the watchman came to the door 
to "bid New Years." It was one of the customs 
of the Old Town that came down from the earliest 
days, happily shorn of some of its mediseval as- 
pects. For then he came not alone, but the whole 
body of watchmen together, a kind of recon- 
noissance in force, to which the fact that the 
public executioner came with them lent a sug- 
gestion which no one could afford to let go un- 
heeded. That it really was a kind of official 
blackmail is made apparent by certain ordinances 
passed in the Sixteenth Century which forbade the 
practice and fixed a regular schedule of charges 
for these public servants. The executioner was 
to have one dollar for chopping off a head or 
hanging a man, half a dollar for an ear, a dollar 
and a half for burning a witch at the stake, and 
so forth. It was not much. When one reads of 
his using twenty-two loads of wood for burning a 
single witch, it seems but poor pickings for a 
hard- worked man; but then he made up for it 
by having his hands full. He burned thirteen 



THE OLD TOWN 205 

witches between the years 1572 and 1652, and 
beheaded one. Of ears and such small fry no 
account seems to have been kept. Besides all this 
he was street-cleaning commissioner 1 and offal 
contractor, with the express proviso, however, 
that he must not himself engage in the latter 
business as beneath his dignity, but must farm it 
out to the town chimney-sweep. It will be seen 
that the executioner was by no means a dis- 
reputable man, but a functionary of importance 
who could not be allowed to go begging from door 
to door. As for the watchmen, they were ordered 
to desist not merely from that practice, but from 
monopolizing the moving business and from boss- 
ing weddings held in the Town Hall; likewise 
they must do no harm to drunken men in the 
street, but must help them home. One look at 

1 The river was included, I suppose ; at all events, it con- 
tributed to his revenues. An old law provided that whoever 
polluted the stream by throwing any uncleanness into it 
should lose his life. The Thirteenth Century had a curious 
way of anticipating the things upon which the Twentieth 
prides itself with much vaunting. We cry out against water 
pollution; they prohibited it. It is easy to understand that 
there were no sewers in Ribe. 



206 THE OLD TOWN 

the mug they drank from at council meetings and 
still keep at the Town Hall gives a clew to the 
wherefore of this last ordinance: the councilmen 
themselves might have some trouble navigating 
after a protracted session. 

The demand of these New Year pirates seems 
in the olden time to have been for "candles," 
perhaps a convenient medium of exchange. In 
our day it was frankly for cash. Not only the 
watchman, but every one who had during the 
year rendered the house any service, or might be 
expected to in the year to come, knocked, said 
"Happy New Year," and received a silver mark or 
an "eight-skilling," which was half a mark, as the 
case might be, with the thanks of the house- 
holder. The chimney-sweep was there, washed 
and cleaned for once, — on other days he made it 
a point to look "like his trade," — and the official 
mourner, who alternately bade the town to wed- 
dings and funerals, or gave notice that the stork 
had been around with a baby. A regular "cinch" 
had he, since sooner or later every well-regulated 
family must employ his service. His was a 



THE OLD TOWN 



207 



real profession, and he kept a special face for 
each of his functions. When he was bidding 
to a funeral his gait 
was slow and meas- 
ured, his face grave, 
and his voice had a 
mournful droop that 
matched his rusty 
black coat and an- 
cient silk hat. If it 
was a wedding, he was 
cordial, his step was 
light and his tile 
was set at a rakish 
angle. The man was 
an artist, And so in 
their limited sphere 
were the funeral bear- 
ers, who were among 
our New Year's call- 
ers, too. They were a remnant from the days of 
the executioner, farther back even, to the time 
of the Black Death that killed half the people in 




WJ.Boht 
The Chimney-sweep. 



208 THE OLD TOWN 

the town. Their guild was organized then, a sort 
of mutual insurance concern that made a man sure 
of getting underground at all events ; and, having 
been established, stayed, as did everything else 
till it fell to pieces of itself. The aforesaid ordi- 
nances bear witness that it took much Dutch cour- 
age to carry the dead in the days of pestilence. 
There is one which forbids giving the " bearers" 
a barrel of beer at each funeral as wasteful and 
unseemly. The Old Town did some things after 
all that are worth considering. We do with less 
than a barrel in our day, but even when we do 
without it altogether, there is still waste enough 
about our funerals that is both unseemly and 
unfit in a Christian land. 

The head of the house sat in state with a plate 
full of silver coins beside him on the day these 
callers made their rounds, and responded to each 
salutation in kind ; said " Thank you, same to you/' 
and handed the caller his coin. He twirled his 
cap, spat on the silver for good luck, put it in his 
pocket, scraped out, and made room for the next 
comer. If it was the night-watchman, he had 



THE OLD TOWN 



209 



perhaps a word about the wind being in the north- 
west , " blowing up to a storm/' or about the mar- 
ten that ate the last batch of squabs. The marten 
lived in the attic under the roof beams, where it 
had its young in peace. It was not disturbed, 
though it 
made an oc- 
casional raid 
on the hen 
roost or the 
pigeon coop ; 
but that was 
to be guarded 
against. To 
make up for 

it, it ate' the rats that infested the old houses, 
and for this service it was let alone. We saw it 
sometimes on moonlight nights, a black shadow 
up among the pointed gables, big as a cat, it 
seemed to me, and with a cat's long tail. The 
watchman knew all its haunts, being a night 
prowler himself, and could tell when it was " get- 
ting too many" for the peace of the hen roost. 




We saw it on moonlight nights." 



210 THE OLD TOWN 

Then shot-guns came out, and after some still- 
hunting by moonlight things were evened up 
again and put upon a peace basis. 

As pater familias sat awaiting his New Year's 
callers, he had the advantage always of knowing 
who was in the offing making for his door, and 
could arrange his contribution accordingly. That 
was because of the universal use of window 
reflectors, two mirrors set at an angle and fixed 
on the outside of the window. Sitting in your 
chair by it, you could tell who was coming from 
either side, half a block away. I often wonder 
why they are not more used on this side of the 
ocean. I should think they would be a great con- 
venience if one did not wish to be "at home" for 
undesirable callers. Perhaps that was how the 
Bishop's wife escaped meeting the Burgomaster's 
lady they used to tell of in Copenhagen. They 
were not exactly friends, but their position re- 
quired them to be agreeable before the world. 
So they exchanged visits, and upon one of these 
occasions the Burgomasterinde found the Bishop's 
Manse deserted, with evidences of hasty flight. 



THE OLD TOWN 211 

Now the good Bishop's wife was not noted nearly 
as much for tidiness as for her sharp wit, and the 
Burgomasterinde took a long chance when, seeing 
the mahogany table covered with a thick layer 
of dust, she wrote on it "P-i-g." But she felt 
better, no doubt, and went on her way rejoicing. 

Some days later the two ladies met on the street. 
"Oh!" said the Burgomaster's wife, "I called 
at your house last week, but you were not in." 

"Yes, I am so sorry/' from the other, sweetly, 
"I found your card on the table." 

They played the Old Town a trick once, those 
reflectors, that is hard to forgive. It was when 
the burghers who dwelt in the Main Street in- 
sisted upon the town removing the North Gate 
that obstructed their view. They "could not 
see past it." No more they could, for it 
fairly blocked the way. But it was the last rem- 
nant of the old walls, which, imperfect as they 
were, for they never reached around, had borne 
the brunt of many an assault, and it was over 
this the iron hand was fixed in the days of rigor- 
ous Ribe justice. It was a wretched fate that 



212 



THE OLD TOWN 



sacrificed it to the whim of a lot of curious women 
who wanted to spy on their neighbors. How- 
ever, they got their deserts. They had forgotten 
that the street turned just beyond the gate, and 
when it was down and out of the way, behold! 






.S"*-" 




The North Gate. 

they could see no farther than before. I do not 
know what they did. I know what sensible 
people said about it twenty years after. But I 
suppose the gate would have gone anyway, so it's 
no use grieving. 

Speaking of women's ways, a fashion grew up 



THE OLD TOWN 213 

three hundred years ago of wearing their cloaks 
or petticoats over their heads instead of on their 
shoulders, in the street and to church, where, so 
shrouded, they slumbered peacefully through the 
sermon and, say the contemporary accounts, 
even slept at the altar-rail through the com- 
munion service. Talk about women wearing 
hats in church ! Those cloaks became such a 
nuisance to the clergy that the practice was 
sternly forbidden in town council under penalty 
of a fine. Widows and mourners were excepted, 
but the latter only for six months. There is no 
mention of a petticoat revenue, so probably the 
practice ceased of itself. 

A custom that made a deep impression on us 
children was the semi-annual " offering" in the 
Domkirke. Part of the revenues of priest and 
deacon was derived from free gifts of the people 
at Easter and Christmas — free, that is, to all 
appearances; but custom prescribed the exact 
amount of what was really a tax upon every 
householder. On these Sundays, when the last 
hymn had been sung and the sexton's purse on its 



214 THE OLD TOWN 

long pole had been poked into the farthest pew, 
the Dean put on his crimson robe with the big 
white cross down the back that made him look 
as if he were clad in the national flag, and took 
his place at the altar. The organist pulled a stop 
that set a little bell tinkling and started a silver 
star spinning in the organ loft. That was the 
signal for all the men to rise, and with the Amt- 
mand, the Rector, and the Burgomaster leading 
on, they marched up to the altar and laid their 
gifts there in two piles, one for the priest, the other 
for the clerk, always silver, which made quite a 
heap before the last coin had clinked upon it. 
The organist always played the hymn with the 
longest and slowest metre while the procession 
was passing, to give it time, I suppose, and the 
order of procedure was rigidly maintained. For 
a boss carpenter, for instance, to have gone be- 
fore a teacher in the Latin School, even though 
his offerings had been twice the size of the other's, 
would not have done at all. They kept step very 
well to the music, going and coming back, though 
I fancied their march was a little brisker on the 




The Emperor's Birthday. 



THE OLD TOWN 215 

return, as if they were glad it was over. Odd 
what impressions children get and keep. To 
me, looking back, it seems the one really great 
religious ceremony in the Domkirke I remember, 
always excepting the time the King came and one 
other. That was when the Austrian soldiers, dur- 
ing the occupation in '63-'64, celebrated the birth- 
day of their Emperor with a high mass. There 
had not been a Catholic service in the cathedral 
since the Reformation, and there has not been 
one since. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was 
the whole setting of august ceremonial and 
warmth and color that were foreign there; the 
uniforms, the bugles, the incense, with the strange 
tongue and the evident devotion of the soldiers 
who knelt on the marble floor — it all left an 
impression on my mind and heart that has never 
faded. It is rank heresy, of course, and I would 
never subscribe to it in cold blood, but it did 
seem somehow as if the old House of God came 
to its rights once more. Saints of old whose 
knees, bent in worship, had hallowed those 
ancient stones, walked again in the vaulted aisles, 



216 THE OLD TOWN 

and the image of the martyred Bishop Leofdag 
in the wall outside seemed to nod as with under- 
standing as we went by. I saw the lights go out 
with regret. Perhaps, unknown to myself, it had 
something to do with my desire in years long after 
to put a couple of stained-glass windows in the 
chancel that looks so white and cold. But they 
did not want them. They Were not in the style, 
they said. Perhaps they were right. But oh ! 
for a little warmth in our worship now and then, 
even at the sacrifice of being right in the matter 
of style. 

It may be that the fact that the Emperor's 
birthday came in summer, if my memory serves 
me right, had something to do with it. The 
most loyal friend of the Domkirke could not have 
sat out the services there in winter without dis- 
comfort. There was no way of heating it, had 
not been since the beginning of our century, when 
the " fire-pan " given to it by a pious burgher in 
1473 was taken out and sold for old iron. A 
legacy went with it that was forever to keep it 
in coal, so that "the poor and the church-goers 



» 



THE OLD TOWN 217 

should not suffer from the cold. What became 
of that, I don't know. They did many queer 
things in the days before reverence for the great 
past, and its memories and landmarks, awoke 
with the struggle for nationality and for freedom 
in our own time. Among other things they 
stripped some of the ancient grave-stones of their 
beautiful engraved brass plates for the melting 
pot, when a new bell had to be cast. And down 
in Holstein, where the sacred banner that fell 
from heaven to the Danish knights in the Esth- 
land crusade and saved the battle that was all 
but lost, had been left by the indifference of a 
later day in hostile hands, they took it at house- 
cleaning time and, esteeming it just a moth- 
eaten and tattered rag, burned it with other 
rubbish in the public road. 

In Ribe, for a hundred years the people put on 
their overcoats and mufflers and their rubbers 
when they went to church and sat it out as they 
could; or else they stayed at home. Even so 
clothed we sat and shivered, our toes growing 
numb on the stone floor. When it was over, we 



218 THE OLD TOWN 

limped out and took a quick walk around the 
Castle Hill to "get up circulation." The walls 
of the Domkirke were thick, and it was past 
Christmas before the winter had quite moved in; 
but then it stayed well into the summer, refusing 
to be dislodged by spring until the roses were in 
bloom. In the great restoration, of which more 
hereafter, it was at last the upstart factory across 
the Linden Square, that had once so piqued the 
conservatism of the Old Town, which, having 
been by that time abandoned, gave its boiler 
house to be a heating plant for the church. And 
so the old and the new met once again, and atone- 
ment was made for past misconduct. 

I have spoken of the square red tower which, 
though part of the Domkirke, and its great and 
distinguishing feature seen from afar, did yet 
belong under the civil government as the strong- 
hold of the burghers in time of trouble, typifying 
curiously the union of church and state, and 
crumbling slowly like that in my day. It had 
given fair warning to more than one generation. 
There was a house in Priest Street, straight up 



THE OLD TOWN 219 

from the tower, with the old arms of the town 
picked out in colors above its door, which I 
never could pass without a shudder. As far as 
that, tradition had it, the tower fell on Christ- 
mas morning in the year 1283, when it collapsed 
during early mass while the church was full of 
people. Very many were killed. It was in the 
time after the death of the great Valdemar when 
the country was torn by dissension within and 
onslaught from without. An earthquake had 
shaken the land eleven years before, probably 
contributing its share to the insecurity of the 
tower, and one can imagine the " great fear that 
prevailed" among the people. Again in 1594 
the upper part of the tower fell, and in the re- 
building it received the shape and height which 
it has kept. 

The tower falcon, a fierce-eyed, solitary bird of 
prey, was its rightful tenant in my day; had 
been, I fancy, from the beginning. He seemed 
to fit in with its warlike traditions. The boys 
caught him in traps, sometimes, and kept him 
chained about the house, but never for long, 



220 THE OLD TOWN 

for he was utterly untamable and his shriek was 
not melodious. Furthermore, his diet of meat, 
preferably live mice, kept us scurrying in a way 
we quickly tired of. The falcon has moved. 
A score of years ago they overhauled the village 
church at Seem, three miles up the river, and 
dislodged a family of rooks that lived there. In 
search of new quarters they struck the Domkirke, 
liked it, and stayed. The newcomers were great 
chatterers, while the falcon is a silent bird, and 
moreover they brought all their relations. In 
disgust, I suppose, at the racket they made, the 
falcon betook himself to the Plantage and be- 
came a dweller in trees. My boy reports that he 
is there yet. He has been up to see. The rooks 
stayed and multiplied exceedingly. At least I 
supposed them to be rooks, till, last summer, 
I stood on the top of the tower in Windsor Castle 
and was told by the caretaker that the black 
birds hopping about were jackdaws. They were 
the very same. 

Jackdaws or rooks, they took possession of the 
big tower and of the little one, and they have 



THE OLD TOWN 221 

kept it since. By day they go afield for their 
food; but sundown always finds them in loud 
and general debate on the stone railing of the red 
tower. They sit in military files discussing the 
subject in hand in very human fashion: now one 
at a time, and again all together, squawking at 
the top of their voices. Year by year their num- 
ber grows, since no marten can reach them on 
their roost. There came a time when it seemed 
as if something ought to be done, if they were not 
to practically own the town. The matter came 
up in council, and the debate that ensued was 
worthy of the best days of the Old Town. The 
consensus of opinion was that they were getting 
to be a nuisance ; but how to stop it was another 
matter. , 

"They are here," said one of the city fathers, 
"and what are you going to do about it ? " There 
was no answer. Upon the question what was 
their diet no one could shed any definite light; 
but it suggested a ray of hope to one. 

"They might," he ventured, "be good to eat." 
The city fathers considered one another thought- 



222 THE OLD TOWN 

fully. They were certainly fat. If they were to 
turn out a new kind of game, now! It ended, 
after long debate, in a committee being appointed 
to take the matter under practical advisement, 
with directions to report at a future meeting 
whether the rooks were good eating, or, if not, 
how they disagreed with a councilman's stomach. 
Six months had passed when last I fished with a 
member of the committee. He screwed up his 
mouth and shook his head dubiously as he made 
a cast for a pickerel hiding in the rushes. 

"They are fat, yes," he said ruefully. "They 
might be good, and then again — they might 
make you sick." 

Caution, says an ancient Danish proverb, is 
the virtue of a burgomaster. It ought at least 
to be the privilege of a councilman. 

A friend who, like myself, had long been in 
foreign parts where they have other ways, once 
told me that he believed the Danes had no busi- 
ness capacity, at least the Danes who stayed 
at home, because he found them charging the 
big summer hotel a cent more for milk than 



THE OLD TOWN 223 

they exacted from the poor fishermen who lived 
on the shore; and when he asked them why, 
he was told that "the hotel took so much more 
and it was more trouble." But in the first 
place that was true; and, further, I think it 
was their inborn sense of fairness plus their 
stubborn democracy that was breaking out 
there. The small folk were to be protected 
against the wealthier neighbor. A people with- 
out business capacity would never have thought 
of the expedient the Old Town hit upon in a 
dispute with the local gas company, long after 
I had gone away. The sidewalks are narrow, 
with never room for more than one, and the 
nights are sometimes very dark. So, as the 
gas company refused to give in and the town 
refused to burn gas till it did, and consequently, 
all parties to the quarrel being Jutlanders, there 
was no telling when the dispute would be set- 
tled, if ever, the council ordered that the lamp- 
posts be painted white to avoid collision and 
suits for damages. If that is not business sense, 
what is it ? 



224 THE OLD TOWN 

No. The Old Town moves with delibera- 
tion, it is true. But then, the rest of us are in 
too much of a hurry. No one ever is, there. 
What is there to run after? The clock that 
has counted the hours since before Napoleon 
stirred up the dry bones of Europe still stands 
in its corner and ticks the seconds, the hours, 
the years, twice a day pointing its slow finger 
to the date graven on its face: 1600-1700-1800 
— why should one hurry? If we but wait, 
the years will come to us and carry us with them 
to our long rest. And there will be others where 
we are now. The world will move; men will 
live and labor and love; and the old clock will 
tick in the hall, counting the hours, the days, 
the years. It is the Old Town's philosophy. 
If it has not made it rich, or powerful, or great, 
it has made it content. Who shall say then 
that it is not as good as the best ? 

There is one that ticks in a house I know of 
where eyes I loved smiled to it and nodded to 
it every day in passing. In 1792 it was made 
in Ribe, where famous clock-makers lived then. 



THE OLD TOWN 225 

I tried to buy it; I offered two hundred kroner 
for it, which was a small fortune to the Old 
Town. But its owner shook his head. It had 
been in the family since his great-great-great- 
grandfather, and it would stay there as long 
as there were any of them left. I shook his 
hand. I should have been sorry had he been 
willing to sell. It would have been like be- 
traying an old friend. They were poor, but 
they were loyal. It was the Old Town all over. 
Years ago the last of the clock-makers lived in 
Black Friars Street, in our block. One morn- 
ing there was a great crash. It was their house 
that had fallen down. The neighbors hastened 
up to help, and when a way had been made 
through the wreck, found the old man and his 
wife lying calmly in bed. The beams had formed 
a shelter over them, and they were safe till the 
next cave-in. They urged them to hurry out, 
but the old couple refused. It was their home. 
They had always lived in it and, now they were 
old, would die in it if need be rather than seek 
another. They were like Heine's lovers: 



226 THE OLD TOWN 

Wir Beide bekummern uns um nichts 
Und bleiben ruhig liegen. 

They had to take them out by force. 

No need of haste. The mail-coach waited 
for you in the old days, once you were regis- 
tered as a passenger, till you came. It would 
have been base to desert you. The train waits 
now till you climb aboard and station-master 
and conductor have exchanged the last item of 
news. The red-coated mail-carrier taps on your 
window with the expected letter and a sympa- 
thetic "It's come." The telegraph messenger 
who meets you in the street with his message 
goes home with you to hear the good news; 
he knows it is good. The mill-wheels drone in 
the stream their old drowsy lay that was old 
when you were born. Down by the castle 
garden a worn wheel whirs and hums in the rope- 
walk where father and son go spinning their end- 
less cord, side by side, as did their people before 
them as far back as any one can remember. 
Why should one hurry? The sun sinks low in 
the west. Far upon the horizon there is a gleam 



THE OLD TOWN 



227 



J^MP* . 










It's come." 



228 THE OLD TOWN 

of silver: it is the sea, sleeping in a calm. The 
bells of the Old Town peal forth their even 
song. The cows come home from the meadows. 
In the Cloister shadows trembling hands are trim- 
ming the evening lamp, tired old feet tottering 
to their rest. A day is ended. Above blossom- 
ing gardens the stork looks down from its nest, 
wiser than the world of men : another will dawn. 
So that its evening be peace, what matters the 
rest? It is the message of the Old Town. 



CHAPTER IX 




The Accursed Candlestick. 



OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER 

To us it will al- 
ways be "our beau- 
tiful summer," I 
expect, and, indeed, 
I fancy it will be 
so remembered 
throughout the Dan- 
ish land. 1 For the seasons there had suffered a sad 
decline since my boyhood days. Then the sun 
shone always in summer, the autumn days were 
ever mellow as the ripened nuts we shook from 
the hazel bushes, and in winter we skated from 
Christmas until the March winds woke the slum- 
bering spring. At least so it seems to me now. 
They tell me that this generation of boys has 
almost forgotten the art of skating; that they 
do not know how to cut the figure 8, or the name 
of the girl they like best, in the ice, because 

1 The summer of 1904, the year of our home-coming. 

229 



230 THE OLD TOWN 

there is no ice more than half the time; that in 
summer they have to hurry so between showers 
that all the fun is gone out of the haying. And 
as for the autumn, I am not likely to forget one 
that found me stranded there, sick and desolate 
just as the century was closing; the long, wake- 
ful nights I lay listening to the storm shaking 
my window and whistling through the cracks 
as if it were mocking my helplessness, with four 
thousand miles of tempestuous sea between me 
and home. I sailed them all in those night- 
watches, with never a rift in the pitiless gray 
skies, till I saw at last a coast lying golden in the 
sunset, and knew it from the way my heart 
leaped within me for the Blessed Isles where 
home was. It was then I learned that I, too, 
belonged here where my children were born. 

But this summer was one long holiday with- 
out a cloud. The sun set in yellow glory on 
that June day when we landed, hours after chil- 
dren should be in bed and asleep ; but how could 
one ask it in reason, with the day, as it seemed, 
only half over ? And it rose in undimmed splendor 



THE OLD TOWN 231 

on the September morn that saw us wave tear- 
ful good-bys and sail away, past Hamlet's Castle 
and Elsinore, and leave our fairyland behind. 
We rode in on the hay wagons, we saw the 
sheaves of golden grain stacked and housed. 
We watched day by day the stalks of Indian 
corn by the fountain in the King's Square grow 
ears as big as any in Kansas fields. They were 
flaunting great shocks of shining silk when we 
went away, to the admiration of the good people 
of Copenhagen, who were never tired of looking 
at the strange plant; and I, with the memories 
of Long Island strong upon me, was deep in a 
plot to teach that gardener how to make "hot 
corn, " since ripen they would not, those ears, 
when my wife came along and wrecked that 
dinner and my reputation with one swoop by 
declaring that "they were not that- kind, but 
common chicken corn." I never knew until then 
that there was any difference. But, sweet 
corn or chicken-feed, dinner or no dinner, it 
was truly a beautiful summer. All Denmark 
will bear me out in that. 



232 THE OLD TOWN 

We had gone, we old folk, to see once more 
the fields where we played when we were chil- 
dren, and to us there was in it the sadness of the 
long ago. To the young it was a joyous picnic; 
and many a time their laughter in the quiet 
streets, where ghosts walked in broad daylight 
to our sight at every turn, made us stop and 
listen wistfully. For in the Old Town nothing 
was changed. The stork stood one-legged upon 
the peak of the red-tiled roof, holding majesti- 
cally aloof from the ways of men; and in the 
doorway the swallow hatched her young as of 
old. There was the broken pane in the transom 
I knew so well, to let her in, the right of way 
for which she paid in coin of sweetest song. 
I know they laughed at me for calling it song; 
but then they had not been away a lifetime. 
No mocking-bird or nightingale sings to my 
heart as does the house-swallow's cheery note. 
In it are summer and sunshine, and the blossom- 
ing lilacs, and the whisper of the breeze in the 
trees, the children calling to each other at their 
play. It is as the time I had sat through an 



THE OLD TOWN 233 

hour of Christina Nilsson, missing something — 
I knew not what — in all the wealth of music, 
when all at once came "'Way down upon the 
Suwanee River/ ' and melted the icicles away. 
It is many years since, but the mist comes into 
my eyes at the thought of it. That is how the 
swallow sings to me in the streets of old Ribe. 
Down in the river the white swans arched 
their necks as in the days that were, and the 
clatter of the mill-wheels by the dam came up 
with drowsy hum, heavy with the burden of 
the centuries. For Ribe was an old city when 
Christian bishops first preached peace to the 
savage North. In the wall of its great cathe- 
dral there is a stone that once bore the image 
of the earliest among them who fell before pagan 
arrows in the very meadow where we had our 
boyish games. The storms of many winters 
have nearly worn it away; but what reverent 
loyalty vainly sought to preserve, the bigotry 
of a day that thought itself wise as well as pious 
ignorantly achieved in commemoration of hu- 
man hate. When they came to knock away 



234 



THE OLD TOWN 



.,: I ■ . ,, J >• ■/■■■■■■'- --■----." •' 



the whitewash of the Reformation, put on to 
hide what sand and soap and acids could not 
efface (there are clear marks of their having 

been used to de- 
stroy the pictures 
of apostles and 
saints painted in 
Catholic days on 
the great granite 
pillars), there came 
to light, in one of 
the arches pointing 
toward the place 
of Bishop Leof- 
dag's martyrdom, 
a strange figure in 
kilts with fists up- 
raised in threat and 
curse, which presently was seen to be a heathen 
raging against the new day that dared rear a tem- 
ple to the Christians' God upon the very site of 
the ancient sacrifices. The whitewash had kept it 
from decay. The recollection of it came over me 




s 



A Strange Figure in Kilts. 




The Restored Domkieke. 



THE OLD TOWN 235 

with a rush of gratitude that the world is grow- 
ing better and broader and all the time farther 
into the light, when, the other day, I sat in the 
beautiful chapel of the Leland Stanford Uni- 
versity that was built "to the glory of God" 
and to no sect or set of mortals. Some one 
had told the organist that I was there, and upon 
the waves of soft music that floated out into the 
twilight hour there came snatches of a Danish 
hymn I had not heard since childhood until 
twenty-five hundred men and women sang it 
in the old church the day we rededicated it, and 
this time "to the glory of God," with no wish 
to make reservation. Ay ! let the heathen rage, 
within the sanctuary and without. It stands 
there despite them, witness that the light drives 
out darkness, love conquers hate. 

Eight hundred years the old Dom of Ribe 
had borne its testimony, when its crumbling 
walls gave warning that nothing that is of earth 
is imperishable, and now, after many years of 
labor, it stood restored. It was to its birthday 
we had come home. Morning, noon, and even- 



236 THE OLD TOWN 

ing our steps turned toward it; and when at 
night the old town had settled down to its fire- 
side chat, and only the organist was musing over 
the old hymns in his loft, my feet found the 
familiar paths. They needed no guide here, even 
where the shadows lay deepest. There was the 
pillar with the mark of the great flood that two 
hundred years ago * at the Christmastide made ten 
thousand homes desolate upon the Danish coast. 
Though the Dom stands upon the highest spot in 
town, anciently called the mountain because it was 
at least ten feet above the level of the river, the 
water rose man-high within it. We boys used 
to measure up against the mark, and wonder if 
we would ever grow to be so tall. There was the 
oaken door with great bronze rings worn thin 
and light that bore their own testimony to those 
days and their ways. The powerful bishops who 
built the Dom and gave it renown were fighting 
men. It was the custom of their day. The 

1 October 11-12, 1634. The worst flood in Danish history. 
Over twenty-two thousand persons perished in it, all along 
the coast. In one village hard by Ribe — Melby — only one 
young man was left alive. 




The Cat-head Door. 



THE OLD TOWN 237 

one who laid its foundation fell in battle before 
the walls were fairly above ground. But at home 
they wore the mitre, and knew how to make 
even the King hold his hand at the door of the 
sanctuary. To all men it was that literally; 
hence the worn rings. How many appealing 
hands had grasped them with despairing grip, 
no one may ever tell; but this much is certain, 
that the appeal was not in vain. The iron 
hand was over the town gate, indeed, symbol 
of the rigor of human justice that demanded 
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but at 
the church door a mightier was raised to stay 
it, at least until the case had been heard by the 
tribunal that claimed power to loose and to 
bind in the world to come as in the one that is. 
The Cat-head Door, as we called it, because of 
the lions' heads wrought upon it, long since 
ceased to play other part than to frighten us 
children. It was nearest the altar, and, with 
that curious incongruity that in the popular 
superstition assigned to Satan an abode in the 
church when it was forsaken at night, we boys 



238 THE OLD TOWN 

had been told how we could bring him out by 
walking thrice around the building and calling 
each time through the key-hole of that door, 
"Come out!" The third time he would ap- 
pear. I do not think any of us believed it; but 
many a dark night — it was only at such times 
that speech was to be had with his Satanic Maj- 
esty — I have made one of a party to test the 
power of the spell. We made the circuit of the 
Domkirke bravely enough twice, albeit we lagged 
a little on the second lap; but invariably when 
we approached the Cat-head Door on the third, 
a wild panic would seize us, and we ran as if the 
devil were after us in very truth. 

Silly? Of course it was. But in Kibe it 
was bred in the bone. Barely within the door 
that held us in such terror, haven of refuge 
though it had once been, was the accursed candle- 
stick, with its blasphemous ban upon whoever 
should presume to move what some purse-proud 
burgher had hung there to celebrate his own 
littleness, persuading himself and his time, per- 
haps, that it was also to the glory of God. In 



THE OLD TOWN 



239 



such fashion had he succeeded that stories of 
how disaster had befallen when impious hands 







The Old Cloister-church. 

were stretched forth to touch it were whispered 
yet in my school days. The sexton had fallen 
from the ladder, the architect had died sud- 
denly , etc. Silly, certainly. But with every 
spade-thrust in the earth disclosing forgotten 
cemeteries, buried cloister walls, and secret bur- 
rows ; with the watchmen at night droning 
forth their chants of five hundred years ago in 
the dark shadows of the Domkirke; with the 
deep voice of its bell counting the hours, the 
bell that hung in the great tower when men 



240 THE OLD TOWN 

went to war clad in iron — and little else they 
did in that country in those days : with the very 
street names proclaiming the past on every 
hand: Black Friar Street, Gray Friar Street, 
Priest Street. Bishop Street,. Monk Street,. Cloister 
Street. Castle Street. Grave Street — mere names 
now. it is true, but eloquent of things long dead 
— why. the wonder was, not that we were still 
so little, but rather that we had grown so big 
in our world ghosts. 

To one they had put up a marble tablet since 
I was a boy. There it was, set in the wall of the 
old house : 

Here lived the tailor Laurids Splid, whose poor wife. 
Mar en, on November the 9th. 1641. was burned for 
witchcraft on the gallows hill. 

A himdrecl years after the Reformation ! Was 
there a maniac epidemic that swept the world 
and swept men's reason away, as the Black 
Death did their lives in that fatal century? 
Fifty years later still, they hanged the witches 
at Salem, Massachusetts. They did not burn 
them, so I was informed once, when I fell into 



THE OLD TOWN 241 

the error, by a scandalized citizen of that right- 
eous commonwealth. They were not savages, 
he would have me know. The Ribe Christians 
had some bowels too. They tied a pound of 
powder on the woman's back before they flung 
her into the fire, and so cut her sufferings short. 
Surely the devil came out of his hiding-place 
that day and helped feed the fire. The house 
in which Maren lived stands unchanged, except 
for a coat of paint, across the way from the 
jail. She confessed, is the record. Oh, yes ! 
the Seventeenth Century had not forgotten the 
ways of the Inquisition, any more than the 
Twentieth has the fire when its passions are 
aroused, though the merciful pound of powder 
is left out. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but 
there was no swallow's nest in that hall, with 
hungry mouths of little ones gaping to be fed, 
and no peaceful stork upon the roof. Even 
the rats shunned it: a weasel lived in the attic. 
Poor Maren' s travail was brief, let us hope. 
Down the street there lived a man with whom 
it went through a life rich in benediction to his 



242 THE OLD TOWN 

kind. A bishop was he, and a singer whose 
songs will live as long as the Danish tongue. 
He sang of human sorrow and travail and of 
the land yonder where the tears are wiped away, 
until one who did not know went to him once 
with a sneer. Easy for him to speak of trouble 
who had none — rich, well housed, all his lines 
cast in pleasant places! Bishop Brorson heard 
him out with a sad little smile. 

"Come with me," he beckoned, when he 
had done, and led the way to the top story of 
the house. There, in a room made strong with 
iron bars, sat his son, caged like a wild beast, 
a raving maniac. 

" There," he said, with a sigh that must have 
seared the man's soul to his dying day — " there 
is my trouble. " The mark of the bars is there 
yet, — there were no insane asylums in those 
days, — but the good bishop's troubles are long 
over. 

So I wandered, and whithersoever I strayed, 
back to the Dom I came and lingered there. 
There was the seat in which She sat, in her fair 



THE OLD TOWN 243 

girlhood, during the long Sunday sermons, while 
I was banished to the " men's side" across the 
aisle. Yonder the door through which we had 
come in together on the day of our betrothal, 
when the doing gave notice to all the world 
forever after to hold its peace; and down this 
aisle we had walked, hand in hand, with the 
old parson's blessing in our ears and our hearts, 
out into the world that had suddenly become 
glorified. And now, across the Square, there 
hung from a window She and I both well knew, 
the flag of freedom and of hope under which we 
were growing old together. I wanted it so 
that when we came back we should be within 
sight of the Domkirke and as near to it as might 
be. For the church is as much part of my life 
as is the memory of my father and mother. In- 
deed, it is a big part of the life of the Old Town, 
all of its past and more than half of the present. 
With might and main did we wave our flag 
when the King came. For days the silent street 
had echoed with the tramp of troops come from 
far-off garrison towns to receive him. The 



244 THE OLD TOWN 

children stared; they had never seen soldiers. 
In us of the past generation it touched a wound 
that ached still. Forty years had not made 
us forget those winter nights of weary waiting 
for our beaten army on its way to the north, 
its face still to the foe that followed fast. That 
spring we saw our country cut in twain and a 
wall of bayonets drawn between us and our 
brothers to the south. King Christian had not 
forgotten, either, the great tragedy of his and 
the nation's life. I saw it in his furrowed face 
as he looked up at old Dannebrog flying from 
the church tower. Perhaps he thought of the 
thousands of hungry eyes riveted upon it across 
the frontier. Up there at least the enemy could 
not reach it, though he tore it from their homes. 
But if the ghost sat at the banquet, no one 
gave any sign. In fact, no one did anything 
but run and shout for three whole days. It 
was Ribe's one chance to cheer its King, and it 
dropped all else and went at it with a rush. Fifty 
times a day the alarm was given: "Here they 
come ! ' ' and men, women, and children ran 



THE OLD TOWN 245 

and swung their hats and cheered until they 
were red in the face. We too. My little boy 
had announced with republican dignity that 
"he guessed the President was more than any 
King/' but when he saw the kind old face of 
King Christian he swung his flag and yelled 
louder than any of us. 

"Gee! Mamma/ ' he said, when it was over 
for the moment, "I didn't know it was like that. 
I just had to." 

The very guard at the fire-house that was 
there to rush out and toot and present arms 
whenever one of the red-coated royal drivers 
came into view on the box of a coach, lost its 
bearings and turned out to salute a scarlet-clad 
letter-carrier in the twilight. That the bugler 
discovered his mistake, choked off his tune in 
the middle, and so took the whole town into 
the joke, was as it should be. We were in it, 
all of us, and, as young America remarked, 
"up to the neck!" All except the cows. They 
had been warned off the streets during the King's 
stay by police ordinance. Ordinarily they have 



246 THE OLD TOWN 

the right of way, being taken back and forth 
twice a day, to and from the pasture. But 
now they must keep away three whole days. 
The police force of Ribe put the case to me 
convincingly : 

"'Tain't only for the sake of the streets," 
he said; "we don't mind they're dirty; but 
s'pposin' they came up against the Bishop and 
the parsons paradin' — them cows is lawless 
beasts — they wouldn't let them pass, no more 
they wouldn't." 

Hence their banishment and the singular pag- 
eant of numberless led cows, in charge of little 
boys, that paraded through the streets on the 
last day of their freedom. They wanted to see 
as much of the show as they could while they 
had the chance. And see it they did — greens, 
flags, flowers, and all. Into the very yard of 
our hotel I found one youngster leading his cow 
to see the tent they were putting up there for 
the overflow, and also the flag that Hans Peter- 
sen, or Peter Hansen, or somebody, had hoisted 
in his back-yard, where no one could see it but he 



THE OLD TOWN 247 

himself. But then, was he nobody? It was 
his chance to show his loyal good-will, and he 
took it, as did all the rest of us. 

The rising sun found an orchestra of bare- 
headed men on top of the church tower " blow- 
ing in" the festival with old hymn tunes, that 
all might hear and rejoice. That is one use 
the big tower is put to. Of another the fat 
stone balusters that hedge in its top give a hint 
under close scrutiny. Three or four of them have 
been replaced by wooden ones with copper skins. 
The old were shot away in a duel with the Swedes 
who had taken the castle in the seventeenth 
century and were pelted with cannon-balls from 
the tower. Truly, the Church militant ! but 
the tower was built in the beginning for warfare. 
The centuries and the Church — perhaps also 
the modern artillery — tamed it slowly. As 
the day wore on, one excitement followed an- 
other. A big blow brewed in the west, and 
by the middle of the afternoon the North Sea 
itself came in to have a look at the King. 
Where the cows had been pastured, suddenly 



248 THE OLD TOWN 

there was water, and the royalties turned out, 
eager to see the famed " storm flood." But 
the wind died down, and the cows went back 
to their own. Night found the Old Town in a 
blaze of light. In every window of every house 
stood lighted candles; the river was alive with 
boats carrying colored lanterns and joyous sing- 
ers. Above it all a black cloud of bewildered 
rooks flew with loud squawks from the old Cloister 
to the Dom and back again, frightened out of 
their night's rest, and thinking, no doubt, that 
the end of the world had come. 

Old King Christian had tears in his eyes when 
he arose at the banquet to thank his people, 
and so had we all of us when he broke down 
utterly and pleaded for patience "with an old 
man eighty-six years and over." And then 
he gave me the surprise of my life; for in the 
midst of it all he sent one of the gold-gallooned 
lackeys to tell me that he desired to drink to 
my health, and did. Now you may call me a 
snob, or anything else you like; I own that I 
was never so proud in all my days. For there 



THE OLD TOWN 



249 



sat my old townsmen, with whom I had been, 
shall we say, just a bit off-color in spite of all, 






because I did 
not do accord- 
ing to the rules, 
but broke over 
the traces every 
way, and went 
off to America 
to do mercy 
knows what out- 
landish stunts in 
the way of earn- 
ing a living. 
There they sat 
now, in their 
own town, and 
saw the King 
himself toast me 
before their very 
faces ! I did think my measure was full when I 
beheld the President of the United States take 
my wife in to dinner in the White House — I 




King Christian comes from Church. 



250 THE OLD TOWN 

know I nearly burst with pride in her and in him 
— but now, indeed, it was running over. In self- 
defence, lest I grow vain and foolish, I had to 
pinch myself, and remember the Iowa farmer 
who sized me up last winter. I met him going 
to one of my lectures, and when he found out 
that I was the man who was to speak, he looked 
me up and down, and passed verdict thus : 

"Well, now, you never kin tell from lookm' 
at a toad how far he'll jump!" 

Back to the soil, is the proper cure for the big 
head any day. 

Now that I am back home I can speak of 
another surprise that befell, if the little people 
can be left out the while. They might not under- 
stand. It was when I looked my classmates 
from the Latin School over. There were fifteen 
of us, and the thirteen took the strait and nar- 
row road. They were good and they prospered. 
Hans and I were the black sheep who perennially 
disputed the dunce's seat on the last bench, 
and disputed pretty much everything else. It 
seems that we never found time to learn for 



THE OLD TOWN 251 

fighting, and no doubt the class felt it as a relief 
when we quit, out of season, Hans to go into 
business where he belonged, I to learn a trade. 
And now, after a lifetime, what was my sur- 
prise to find that of the whole fifteen the two 
whom the King had singled out for decoration 
with his much-coveted cross were — Hans and 
myself. The thing came to me with a stunning 
sensation when I saw the ribbon pinned on 
Hans's coat that day ; and when we were together 
in his home at tea, it worked out into my con- 
sciousness. 

"Hans," I said, "did it occur to you — " 

A motion of his hand stayed me. "Fritz V 
he called, sharply, "time you were at your les- 
sons," and not until the door had closed upon 
the reluctant retreat of the son of the house did 
he turn to me with a twinkle in the eye. 

"Yes," he said, "it did. We got through 
somehow, but on your life don't you let the boy 
hear. He is in it now." 

All things come to an end, and this did too. 
When the King was gone and Ribe had settled 



252 THE OLD TOWN 

down to talk it over, I had my chance of getting 
even for sundry little digs at my home across 
the seas that I had scored up. They will do 
it ; it is in the blood. To the old country, when 
it is as old as Ribe, we shall remain, I suppose, 
to the end of time a lot of ex-savages, barely 
reclaimed from the woods and scalp-locks and 
such, and in the nature of things not made to 
last. It was at a social gathering where the 
one all-absorbing topic was the Domkirke, 
that the worm turned. The walls would stand 
now a hundred years, some one said, and shot a 
pitying glance at me, that said as plainly as 
speech: "Your whole republic isn't much older 
than that, and where will it be in another hun- 
dred?'' But I had been up in the roof of the 
church the day before with the boss carpenter 
to look at the big beams, and something there 
seemed familiar. To my question he nodded: 
Yes ! he had bought the lot on the sea, a ship 
load of American timber, pitch-pine, and there 
it was. So I was not slow to rise to my friend's 
bait. 



THE OLD TOWN 253 

"And," I added, when I had told them, "your 
walls of old-world stone may stand a hundred 
years on your own showing; or give them two. 
But the carpenter told me that, barring ac- 
cidents, there is no reason why the roof of Ameri- 
can timber should not last a thousand and be 
as good as new." I think I scored. 

But we bore no grudges. I owe them too 
much for that. The sun shone so brightly upon 
my mother's new-made grave, which hands of 
loving friends had garlanded with flowers against 
her boy's home-coming; the grass was so green 
and the thrush sang so sweetly in the hedge, 
that the sting went out also of that sorrow and 
only the promise remained. It is good to have 
lived, and though its days be mostly gray under 
northern skies, glad am I that mine were framed 
in the memories of the Old Town. We sought 
and found it together, She and I, the house in 
which I dreamed as a boy, in the street of the 
Black Friars. The window-pane was still there 
upon which I wrote "From here I can see Elisa- 
beth's garden" beyond the river, heaven knows 



254 THE OLD TOWN 

with what stylus to cut so deep. With a dozen 
little mouths to feed in our home, diamonds 
were not lying loose there. The trees have grown 
and shut garden and stream out of sight. But 
the river divides us no longer, and though the 
shadows lengthen and the frost is upon our heads, 
into our hearts it cannot come. Hand in hand, 
we look trustfully across to that farther shore, 
to the land of the rising sun where we shall find 
what we vainly seek here: our youth in the 
long ago. 

So we came home. I shall not soon forget 
the morning when, to the wondering sight of 
our thousand immigrants, the panorama of the 
great world city rose out of the deep. They 
crowded the rail of the steamer as it came slowly 
up through the Narrows. Clad in their holiday 
clothes, they stood in quiet groups, gazing si- 
lently toward the land, all the fun and the horse- 
play of the voyage gone out of them. To the 
jester of the steerage it was but a dull mood, 
and, thinking to cheer them, he leaped upon a 
chest and harangued the crowd, telling them 



THE OLD TOWN 255 

in their own language that they were coming 
to a land where the golden rule read, "Do others 
or they will do you." 

" Cheer up!" he shouted, "and let's have 
a song. Who can give us a jolly one?" 

There was no answer. Till somewhere in 
the crowd a lone, far-away voice began a verse 
of an old Norwegian hymn and sang it to the 
end in a clear alto. There was a little uneasy 
laugh in the corner by the wheel-house, but as 
the singer went on, never faltering, here and 
there a voice fell in, and before he had come 
to the end of the second verse it swelled in one 
common strain: "On this our festal day." 
Everybody was singing. The jester had dis- 
appeared. He was forgotten, as they looked 
out, men and women, with folded hands toward 
their Promised Land. I thought of my friend 
who fears for our democracy, and wished he 
were there to hear his answer. For it was the 
answer. Such as these have its hope in keeping. 



KING FREDERIK AT HOME 



KING FREDERIK AT HOME 




I had never met 
King Frederik — the 
Crown Prince he was 
then — until the sum- 
mer of 1904, which we 
spent at Copenhagen. 
As a boy I had seen 
him often and pulled 
off my cap to him, 
and always in return had received a bow and 
a friendly smile. But at home, and to speak 
to, I had not met him till that summer. We 
were at luncheon at our hotel one day, noth- 
ing further from our thoughts than princes and 
courts, when the portier came in hot haste to 
announce a royal lackey who wished speech 
with me. Right behind him up loomed the 
messenger, in his gold lace and with his silver- 
headed cane ever so much more imposing a 

259 



260 THE OLD TOWN 

figure than the King himself. "Their Royal 
Highnesses, the Crown Prince and the Crown 
Princess/ ' so ran his message, "desired our 
attendance at dinner at Charlottenlund the 
next day but one." 

"The dickens they do," I blurted out, for- 
tunately in English, with a vision of silk hats 
and regalia of which I had none. But my wife 
pulled my sleeve and saved the day. "Would 
he thank their royal highnesses very much; we 
should be glad to come/' was the way it went 
into Danish. Whereupon he bowed and went, 
leaving us staring helplessly at one another. I 
think we were both disposed to back out; but 
the children decided it otherwise. Of course 
we must go. Such an honor ! 

So we went. After all, it was simple enough. 
I just borrowed a top hat (that did not fit; I 
was glad to carry it in my hand in the presence 
of royalty, for it simply would not come down 
over my head; it was three sizes too small). 
The rest was easy. We drove out with the 
American Minister and his wife, who were in- 



THE OLD TOWN 261 

vited too. It was for a long time after a dis- 
puted question in our family whether it was the 
cross of Dannebrog I wore on my breast, and 
therefore me, the sentinels saluted ; or the Ameri- 
can Minister. But he wore no cross. My wife 
insisted mischievously that it must be his car- 
riage. Could she have seen herself, charming 
princes and princesses alike with her sweet and 
gracious ways, there would have been no mys- 
tery. Where she passed, everybody was made 
glad. They saluted from sheer desire to do it. 
And then, we were guests of royalty. 

Charlottenlund lies in the forest just outside 
Copenhagen, on the beautiful Shore Road. It 
blew in from the water, and the ladies, on ac- 
count Of their hats, preferred to ride backwards. 
And so, chatting and laughing, we wheeled into 
the palace grounds before we knew we were 
halfway, and found ourselves heading a pro- 
cession of royal carriages bent for the palace. 
They were easily known by their scarlet-coated 
drivers. We had barely time to change around, 
to get our wives properly seated, when the door 



262 THE OLD TOWN 

of the carriage was yanked open and lackeys 
swarmed to help the ladies. In we went. Al- 
most before we could draw breath a door was 
thrown wide, our names were announced, and 
the Crown Princess came forward with out- 
stretched hand. 

"It was very good of you to come out to us," 
she said. 

Our entrance had been so sudden, due to the 
hustle to make way for the princes following close 
upon us, and in thought and speech we had been 
so far away during the trip, that the Danish 
greeting left me for the moment dumb, groping 
my way four thousand miles across the sea. 
Slowly and laboriously, as it seemed to me, I 
found the tongue of my childhood again, but 
awkward beyond belief. This is what it said: 

"How very respectable of you to ask us." 

The Crown Princess looked at me a moment, 
uncertain what to think, then caught the look 
in my wife's face, and laughed outright. At 
which the Prince came up and heard the ex- 
planation, and we all laughed together. The 



THE OLD TOWN 263 

next moment the room was filled with their 
children, and we were introduced right and 
left. It was all quite as neighborly and as 
informal as if we had been at home. Fine young 
people, all of them; finest of them all Prince 
Karl, who is now King Haakon of Norway. Hand- 
some, frank, and full of fun and friendliness, 
he was both good to look at and to speak with; 
and in that he resembled his father. They all 
have the slender, youthful shape of the old King. 
But for his furrowed face and the tired look 
that often came into it in the last few years, 
no one would have thought him over fifty, though 
he was nearly ninety. The Crown Prince at 
sixty-one seemed barely forty. 

My wife was taken in to dinner by a prince, 
a shy, boyish young fellow, whose great ambi- 
tion, he confided to her, was to live in a New 
York sky-scraper and shoot up and down in the 
elevator, which was entirely contrary to her 
inclinations, and she told him so. I was not 
so lucky, but I shall always remember that 
evening with unalloyed pleasure for the hearty 



264 THE OLD TOWN 

and unaffected hospitality of our hosts and of 
everybody. The Crown Prince talked of America 
and its people with warm appreciation, and of 
President Roosevelt as a chief prop of the 
world's peace, at the very time when some 
people at home were yet shouting that he was a 
firebrand. He thought him a wonderful man, 
and we did not disagree. The thing that es- 
pecially challenged his admiration was his capac- 
ity for work — for getting things done. That 
any one could get access to him in a nation of 
eighty millions, and get a hearing if he was en- 
titled to one, seemed to him marvellous. He 
was interested in everything done for the toiler 
in our great cities, and heard with visible inter- 
est of the progress we were making in the search 
for the lost neighbor. The talk strayed to the 
unhappy conditions in Russia, the Jewish massa- 
cres, and the threatening unrest. My wife was 
expressing her horror at the things we read, 
and I began to feel that we were skating on very 
thin ice, seeing that the Czar was the Crown 
Prince's nephew, when I heard him say to her, 



THE OLD TOWN 265 

with great earnestness, "You may believe that 
if my sister had the influence many think, many 
a burden would be eased for that unhappy people." 
And my heart swelled with gratitude ; for Crown 
Prince Frederik's sister, the Czar's mother, was 
the sweet Princess Dagmar whom every Danish 
boy loved when I was one of them, unless he were 
the sworn knight of Alexandra, her beautiful sister. 
After dinner we strayed through the garden 
that lies in the shelter of the deep beech forest, 
and when it was bed-time the boys, including 
my wife's cavalier, came to kiss their father 
good-night. It was all as sweet a picture of 
family happiness as if it were our own White 
House at home, and it did us good to witness. 
I think our host saw it, for when we shook hands 
at the leave-taking he said: "You have seen 
now how happily and simply we live here, and 
I am glad you came. Now, take back with 
you my warm greeting to your great President, 
and tell him that we all of us admire him and 
trust him, and are glad of the prosperity of his 
people — your people." 



266 THE OLD TOWN 

He had expressed a wish to my wife to read 
our story, and I sent to London for a copy of 
"The Making of an American/ ' which he fell 
to reading at once, according to his habit. They 
say in Denmark that he reads everything and 
never forgets anything, and has it all at his 
fingers' end always. I had proof of that when 
we next met. It was in the Old Town at the 
reopening of the Domkirke. I was coming 
out of our hotel at seven in the morning, and 
in the Square ran plumb into a gentleman in a 
military cloak, who had a young man for com- 
pany and a girl of fifteen or sixteen. 

"Good morning, Mr. Riis," said he. "I hope 
you are well, and your wife, since last we 
met." 

It must surely be that I am getting old and 
foolish. The voice I knew; there are few as 
pleasing. But the man — I stood and looked 
at him, while a smile crept over his features and 
broadened there. All at once I knew. 

" But, good gracious, your Royal Highness," I 
said, " who would expect to find you here before 



THE OLD TOWN 267 

any one is up and stirring? You are really 
yourself to blame/' 

He laughed. "We are early risers, my chil- 
dren and I. We have been up and out since 
six o' clock/ ' And so they had, I learned after- 
wards, to the despair of the cook at the Bishop's 
house where they were staying. He introduced 
his son and daughter. "And now," said the 
Prince with a smile that had a challenge in it, 
"where do you suppose we have been? Down 
at the river to look at the bridge where you first 
met your wife. You see, I have read your book. 
But we did not find it." 

I explained that the Long Bridge had been 
but a memory these twenty years, but to me a 
very dear one, and he nodded brightly, "Give 
her my warm regards." She was glad when 
I told her, for her loyal heart had made room 
for him beside his sweet sisters from our child- 
hood. When the lilacs bloomed again, I was 
alone, and he sent me a message of sorrow and 
sympathy. And because of that, for his liking 
of her, he shall always have a place in my heart. 



268 THE OLD TOWN 

They told no end of stories of the delight he 
had given by this gift, so invaluable in a public 
man, of remembering and recognizing men after 
the lapse of years. One peasant, come to town 
to see the show, was halted by Prince Frederik 
in the market square, as was I, and greeted 
as an old comrade. They had been recruits 
together in one regiment; for the royal princes 
in Denmark have to serve in the ranks with their 
fellow-citizens. They are not made generals 
at birth. In Copenhagen I was told that the 
Prince kept tab on all that went on in the Rigs- 
dag, and the man without convictions dreaded 
nothing so much as his long memory. With 
reason it would seem; for not long before, when 
a certain member of the Opposition made a 
troublesome speech, the Crown Prince calmly 
brought out his scrap-book and showed the 
embarrassed minister where the same man had 
taken the exactly opposite stand half a score 
of years before. It is not hard to understand 
how a memory like that might become potent 
in the deliberations of a parliamentary body, 



THE OLD TOWN 269 

particularly among a people with a keen sense 
of the ridiculous; like the Danes. However, 
they have something better than that. They 
are above all a loyal people. I have never 
seen anything more touching or more creditable 
to a nation than the way the Danes put aside 
their claims when the dispute between them 
and King Christian's ministers over constitutional 
rights became bitter, and the King, loyal him- 
self to the backbone, would not let the min- 
isters go. 

"He is of the past that does not compre- 
hend," they said, "but he is our good old King 
and we love him." 

And the clouds blew over, and the people 
and their ruler were united in an affection that 
wiped out every trace of resentment. King 
Frederik is of the present. He knows his people, 
and they trust him with the love they gave 
his father. Stronger buttress was never built 
for a happy union of Prince and People. 



By JACOB A. RIIS 

THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

An Autobiography 

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